Vous êtes sur la page 1sur 239

A Post-Historical Cinema of Suspense

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Limits of Redemption

James Callow
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
University of Bath
Department of European Studies and Modern Languages
November 2010

COPYRIGHT
Attention is drawn to the fact that copyright of this thesis rests with the author.
This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to
recognise that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no
information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author.

This thesis is made available for consultation within the University Library and may be
photocopied or lent to other libraries for the purposes of consultation.
ABSTRACT

This thesis theorises an approach to cinematic suspense derived from a set of films that challenge
the teleological and redemptive principles of traditional narrative. It is argued that such a
challenge is drawn from the need to account for conditions of violence and suffering without
recourse to the traditional grounds of redemption. They set out to question the symbols that
underpin a faith in its possibilities. Such films counter these grounds with a form of perpetuated
suspense that continually withholds resolution, stressing and destabilising both the terms of
redemption and the affect of its aesthetic representations.
Significantly, this thesis examines films from the years following 1989 that confront this
central theme within conditions of historical hiatus and the disintegration of ideological certainties
occurring in the wake of European communism. These films, by Kira Muratova, Bla Tarr, Artur
Aristakisyan, Alexander Sokurov, Bruno Dumont, Roy Andersson, Ulrich Seidl and Gus Van Sant,
present a world in which human beings are always already turned against themselves, placing them
in the context of contemporary philosophical aporias that identify the human condition as
enigmatic and resisting of itself. They suspend the symbolic structures associated with redemption
in order to reconfigure contemporary film as a realist cinema at the threshold of the
interpretative and reconciliatory economies implicit in the soteriological mythology of Western
thought.
Tracing Paul Ricoeurs schematic account of the symbols and myths of a fallen world,
the thesis turns on Jean-Luc Nancys subsequent critique of the insufficiency of myths to properly
account for existence. In place of an hermeneutic recovery of the real and its meaning, Nancys
realist philosophy of sense and its application to the cinema offer an account that speaks less of
conflicting narratives of redemption than a radical stripping away of its terms, suggesting that it is
redemption from the normative terms of redemption that ultimately constitutes the proper
question at the heart of these films.

1
CONTENTS

Abstract 1
Contents 2
Acknowledgements 3
Preface: The Elephant in the Room 4

Introduction: Cinema and the Search for Salvation 8

Part One: History, Context, Style


Chapter 1: Films of Fallibility: the Symbols of Evil and the Interruption of Sin 31
Chapter 2: The Post-Historical Context: Redemptions Hiatus 47
Chapter 3: Redemption as an Aesthetic or Conceptual Practice 73
Chapter 4: Cinematic Realism and the Mystery of Redemption 97
(i) Wim Wenders, Andr Bazin, Seigfried Kracauer: the lost real 98
(ii) Werner Herzog, Paul Schrader, Gilles Deleuze: the mysterious real 108
(iii) Jean-Luc Nancy: the exposed real 117

Part Two: Films


Chapter 5: A-religious Confession: Elephant 124
Chapter 6: Defilement: Flanders 143
Chapter 7: Defilement: The Asthenic Syndrome; Palms; Russian Ark 162
Chapter 8: Sin: Stntang; Songs from the Second Floor 179
Chapter 9: Sin: Werckmeister Harmonies 193
Chapter 10: Guilt: Dog Days; You the Living; Import Export 205

Conclusion: Interrupted Myths and Necessary Negativity 218

Bibliography 226
Filmography 234

2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My gratitude goes to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their generous award of a
Doctoral Research Grant under their Doctoral Awards Scheme, without which it would not have
been possible for me to undertake this thesis.
My heartfelt thanks go to my supervisors, Dr. David Clarke and Ms. Wendy Everett, for
their unstinting support. Special mention should also go to Dr. Fabio Vighi who graciously gave
his time and expertise as an additional reader.
I am indebted to my parents for their continued and unquestioning support. Finally, and
most importantly, to Ming-Jung Kuo, whose patience, encouragement and enquiry kept me going
throughout.

3
PREFACE

The Elephant in the Room

This thesis originates in two encounters. One of these was my first viewing of Gus Van Sants
Elephant (2003), a film that I find, having now seen it many times, still retains the ability to
unnerve, to disturb and, more particularly, to move and to touch with a sense of disquiet that is
hard to qualify. The other was an earlier occasion in which I was involved, as an aspiring
screenwriter, in the development process of a script. The industry-appointed script editors and
development executives, always decent and encouraging, nevertheless could not accept the terms
of the storys outcome, a story drawn from personal experience and one that involved
considerable violence. After much consternation and a general sense of impasse, I was told with
resignation, that, it may be real life but its not drama. What was missing, I was informed, was a
sense of hope, of redemption or the lesson to be learned.
Cinema and violence is an emotionally charged couplet that underwrites the entire history
of the medium. It is a combination that can both denigrate the medium, when necessary, and
elevate it. The cinema is often accused of relishing the spectacle of violence, leading to its alleged
effects on impressionable audiences. At other times, through the ability of film technique to do
violence to perceptual experience, it has been charged with a revolutionary impetus, to shatter the
complacent world and reconfigure it. At stake, in each version of cinemas truth if we can call
it that is redemption: in the first, of the values of its narrative, mythic and symbolic traditions;
in the second, as the potential of its aesthetic, formal, and conceptual possibilities.
Then there is Elephant. The film reruns a recognisable incident from actuality without
making any claims to be that incident. It avoids all narrative and symbolic qualifications for the
event or any terms of understanding it. It overwhelms with the imminence of violence and death
but withdraws from the spectacle of it, its mourning, or the provision of any psychological insight
into victims or protagonists. It replays time without revealing any mystery and it introduces
sounds that have no naturalistically or psychologically motivated right to be there. In short,
when trying to read Elephant according to traditional modes of interpretation it appears to

4
continually escape. Its elements seem to be those that are left remaining after so many attempts to
interpret it have been found wanting.
What is more, this elusive aspect to Elephant chimed with several other films I had seen
around the same time films such as Ulrich Seidls Dog Days (2002), Roy Anderssons Songs from
the Second Floor (2000) and Bla Tarrs Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) each of which, despite their
markedly different styles, forms and subject matter, generated the same sentiments in response: a
need to account for the overwhelming sense of unease left by their seemingly unconditioned
expressions of violence, disintegration and suffering.
When I initially embarked on this thesis as a means to explore this unease more
thoroughly it was in traditional terms. I sought out paradigms and archetypes, genres and
signifying terms of meaning behind the films images of destruction. In particular, it was with
regard to the variable uses of the term apocalypse a word that dogged these films in many
critical analyses, purely on the grounds of their destructive or catastrophic content. Yet such an
archetypal formula never felt fully applicable or appropriate: something in the films was always
lacking, incomplete, or else escaped the neat confines of such term or exhausted it. Nevertheless,
a detour through apocalypses led me to Kira Muratovas film, The Asthenic Syndrome (1990), and
the Russian critic Boris Vladimirskys response to it the conundrum that finally motivates what
follows.
This thesis, then, is my belated attempt to put forward a response to the challenge laid
down by the script editors, although I am fully aware of the Quixotic irrelevance of this, since
theirs is a world of production and funding in which the archetype rules for reasons of commercial
necessity and the systematic calculation of box office receipts. But in film theory, at least, I can
retain the privilege of avoiding the question of how films get made, and consider the effects of a
few that did, somehow or other, and continue to believe that cinema is not determined solely by
the structural rules of story models and still open to the vagaries of real life.
As I followed this thread further, the question of the real in relation to the image and
what it means for the cinema grew increasingly prominent. Moreover, it was invariably bound
up with the notion of redemption, of redeeming some aspect of the world, whether in the
perspectives of thinkers such as Walter Benjamin or Andr Bazin, or practitioners, especially those
of post-war modernism, such as Wim Wenders and Jean-Luc Godard. As cinematic practice
continues to integrate an ever-greater amount of computer-generated imagery and enhancement

5
into its fabric, the question of the nature of its real is likely to re-emerge as a locus and means of
opposition, even transgression, particularly in respect of those areas of financial impoverishment
and budgetary restraint. The real may be what redeems the have-nots from the haves in the
sense that a necessary reliance on a direct contact with the profilmic world rather than the
constructing of representational images becomes paramount. This, however, is the subject of a
different thesis only alluded to here.
In this respect I found it necessary to pay attention to the lengthy history of this relation
between the real and its redemptive impetus in film-theoretical history as a means to sift those
aspects that continued to apply to the recent films I was interested in from those aspects that
seemed to defy established interpretations. In terms of a methodology, this is what led to the
division of the thesis into two basic parts: the first outlining themes from that history, and
importantly, parallel developments in cultural theory in much the same period; the second
applying what can be drawn from it to specific films.
In the course of working through this film-theoretical history I became aware of the
nuanced view of cinema and the real that has been put forward by the French philosopher Jean-
Luc Nancy. It would be remiss to suggest that it was this that provided me with answers, but
what appeared to me to be his likely approach to the question had a profound impact on how I
came to reflect on the films. To get to that point, however, required a certain attempt to come to
terms with the wider philosophical context that is important to Nancys terminology. Any
shortcomings in this area are, of course, entirely mine.
I am also conscious of the recurrent problem by which film-theory so often seeks to apply
or to prove philosophical or theoretical concepts in the light of particular films. It remains my
belief that it is the films themselves that, to some extent, philosophise. If I have ultimately and
unwittingly ended up with an over-application of theory, it came about as a result of a belief that
my chosen films an initial problem was finding a collective term to encompass their various
generic, stylistic, formal or national distinctions were engaged in addressing the same kind of
problems that were occupying thinkers in broader theoretical discourses.
The question of the act of cinema, its practice and technique, being one of contact with a
world at large seems to me to be a crucial one. Having had occasion to make a few films as a
writer, director and producer of both fiction and documentary, none of them of significance
what I retain from that experience is a sense that one is never fully in control. It might be argued

6
that I simply wasnt very good at it. There is a consistent line in film-theoretical discourse that
attributes to films and their makers an absolute awareness of everything they do and that each and
every image is a meticulously formulated ideological or sensory confidence trick intended to
manipulate passive audiences into predetermined responses. The role of the critic is to reveal this
artistry through the interpretation of its signs. Whilst this may be true in many cases, Im inclined
to believe that there is also a form of film practice that happens as a result of a simple enquiry,
and, perhaps, incomprehension about the world. Thereafter, film-makers the good ones
manage to gather some evidence of experiences, situations and conditions in the world that escape
such signs. They assemble what remains of these signs and that which escapes signification and,
very often, leave it at that. Some people may see that as a failure, particularly when the evidence
on show is violent or destructive. It may be that we intrinsically crave a redemptive narrative in
response to whats on show and it is the duty of film, or art, to tell us what form that redemption
takes. Then again, to be left craving it may be the more profound, and more obviously necessary,
affect a film can deliver.

7
INTRODUCTION

Cinema and the Search for Salvation

What stays with us is the image of an author who doesnt believe in the possibility of
salvation and at the same time feverishly seeks it.
Boris Vladimirsky (in Taubman 2005: 61)

It is the above statement by the Russian critic Boris Vladimirsky that provides this thesis with its
central theme. We are confronted with a cinema that invites recognition of the symbols of human
fallibility, frailty and immorality but is devoid of the terms of redemptive teleology traditionally
applied. At the same time these films advance the dissolution of those symbols albeit without
descent into absolute meaninglessness. The question becomes: how might we account for the
possibility of redemption which the films seem to demand and their evocation of a redemptive
aspect in response to the violence, disintegration and suffering depicted?
This question is provoked by a series of films, beginning with Kira Muratovas The Asthenic
Syndrome (1990), to which Vladimirsky was referring, that, despite differences in form, style and
country of origin, are conceptually linked by this central question. Each of them develops from
the locus of violent rupture or pervasive disintegration that is essentially ineffable. They refuse to
rely or fall back on any traditional narrative or epistemological terms of interpretation,
reconciliation or judgement for the acts or conditions they depict. Instead, they demand a
heightened attention to the contradictory, antagonistic and violent aspects of human nature
without qualification. Yet, through this determined and resolute insistence on the simple act of
showing such images, they call upon a register of salvation or redemption above and beyond
generic platitudes or narrative, dogmatic or psychological presuppositions.
In response, it would be reasonable to ask why a religious terminology of salvation or
redemption is evoked, one that would seemingly be dependent on a relation to a divine,
transcendent or non-human act of grace as distinct from any other terms of social, political,
psychological or categorically humanist improvement? It is precisely within a space opened up
between the transcendent and the immanent that the power of their affect might be said to lie, one

8
that in philosophical terms reflects an enigmatically spiritual and aesthetic mode of address that
is in tension with a modern incredulity towards the theological or mystical.
The films in question are replete with suggestive symbols and connotations linked to the
religious or the destinal and calls upon the normative terms of redemption as the site rather than
the solution for the situations they describe. In films as diverse as Palms (1993), Stntang (1994),
Songs from the Second Floor (2000), Dog Days (2002) and Elephant (2003), the central tenet of human
fallibility (whether through developed conditions of systemic antagonism or the rupturing acts of
incomprehensible violence) is played out through the constant presentation and withdrawal of the
symbols of what might be called, depending on ones particular perspective, either the propensity
to sin or the radical evil at the base of the human condition, that is, most broadly, an
inscrutability at the heart of immoral, contradictory or destructive acts (Bernstein 2002). In short,
regarding the question of causes, these films leave only the human condition and its inherent
contradictions and antagonisms as a locus of speculation and, therefore, as the only site of possible
reconciliation. Of course, it is necessary to accept that the term evil (let alone its concept,
essence or cause) remains an aporia with a vast history of philosophical, theological and
psychological discourse, and continues to cause controversy. Accordingly, I am using the term in
this thesis in a manner after Susan Neiman, who has argued that the term remains pivotal, whether
in a philosophical or theological context, as a problem about the intelligibility of the world as a
whole [] it belongs neither to ethics nor to metaphysics but forms a link between the two
(Neiman 2004: 7-8). As such, it remains a concern of aesthetics and the cinema to engage in
the exposure of its effect more than its cause. This effect of evil again after Neiman can be
summarised as a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world (Neiman 2004: 9).
Thereafter, sin, as evils theological equivalent, makes itself felt in the form of the cultural
symbols it has created.
What is proposed is that, beginning with Muratova, a selection of contemporary directors
stand out as having each delivered films that combine the symbols of a redemptive wager with the
simultaneous refusal of all traditional, established representations. Four directors can be singled
out as having made more than one film that turns on this central theme: Bla Tarr, specifically in
his three collaborations with the novelist Lszl Krasznahorkai, Damnation (1989), Stntang
(1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000); Ulrich Seidl, in particular his two fiction feature films Dog
Days (2002) and Import Export (2008); Roy Andersson, with his short film World of Glory (1993)

9
that set the tone for his two subsequent features Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You the
Living (2008); and Gus Van Sant, in those specific works Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005) that
follow his dedication to Tarr with Gerry (2001). In addition, Artur Aristakisyans Palms (1993),
Alexander Sokurovs Russian Ark (2002) and Bruno Dumonts Flanders (2007) add individual titles
to this list. This is not intended to represent a definitive conceptual category nor to qualify each
directors oeuvre. Rather, it offers a recognisable cross-section of films from the period 1989 to
the present that, it will be argued, reflect a new development in the burdened tradition of
redemption as a Western narrative form. These films confront redemptive narratives and the
means to negotiate violence and disintegration through their resistance to the qualifications of
hindsight or the restoration of generic paradigms.
The selection of films from the years following 1989 is not coincidental. It places the films
discussed within the context of the collapse of European communism and its aftermath; an era that
has been controversially called post-historical a term retained here for descriptive purposes.
This in itself locates these films as contemporaneous with conflicting accounts in critical and
cultural theory that revolve around certain aporias that have been identified as a religious turn in
philosophy, or as Slavoj Zizek puts it when confronting head-on the combined legacies of
Christianity and Marxism in the present era, the return of the religious dimension in all its
different guises (Zizek 2001, 1). At the same time, these films, that stretch from Eastern Europe
(Muratova, Tarr, Aristakisyan, Sokurov) through Western Europe (Andersson, Dumont, Seidl) to
the United States (Van Sant), are responsive to a milieu that is conditioned, however secular it
may be said to have become, by a Western and therefore predominantly Christian theological,
philosophical and narrative legacy.
Three central themes emerge for engaging with the question of redemption in respect of
this grouping of contemporary cinematic fictions. Firstly, what is particular to these films that
relates them to salvation and redemption and, therefore, by necessity, to fallibility and sin over
and above individual or particular misdeeds? Secondly, having said that these films are all located
in the present so-called post-historical era, a context conditioned by relativism in place of old
ideological certainties, what becomes of the teleological emphasis implicit in the structure of
redemption? Thirdly, how does the question of redemption, as image or form, relate to the
cinema and what, in fact, is in need of being redeemed? Does the question of the possibility or
impossibility of redemption relate to the workings of cinema itself (as an aesthetic practice, or the

10
saving of the traces of reality within the context of its form) or to a representation of a redeemed
humanity (a narrative, symbolic or conceptual practice), or something in between?
An initial introduction to The Asthenic Syndrome provides a sketch of how each theme is
embedded. Muratovas film records, through the depiction of a fragmented set of conditions, an
emergent destructive chaos at the heart of Russian society ushered in by the collapse of seventy
years of Communist rule. The film itself was completed in 1989 under a still Soviet film-making
system: it was, in fact, the last film to be shelved under that systems censorship regime
reportedly due to an objection to foul language. It was finally premiered at the Berlin Film Festival
in 1990 before being released later that year to Russian audiences (see Taubman 2005).
Accordingly, its production marginally predates the eventual 1991 end of the Soviet State as a
recognised political entity (Smith 2002: 2) whilst documenting aspects of its disintegration from
the inside. Its accumulative scenes of aggression, violence and anomie invoke an apocalyptic
register: the Last Days of a Soviet eschatology that hindsight now confirms.
The film itself is divided into two parts. The first, in monochrome, follows the actions of
a nurse in the immediate aftermath of her husbands funeral. Driven by grief she takes seemingly
perverse pleasure in the rejection of her fellow mourners and the verbal abuse of strangers in the
streets before resigning from her job, insulting her former colleagues and picking up and then
rejecting a pavement drunk after which the story abandons her in the midst of her attempts to
remove a stain from her clothing. This inconclusive sequence of events is revealed to be a film
playing at a Moscow cinema to a disgruntled and uninterested audience. The break introduces the
second, longer section of the film, in colour, that accumulates a series of vignettes of public and
domestic situations constantly disrupted by violence, confrontation, threat or suffering, and
loosely configured around the central character of a narcoleptic schoolteacher, with his wife,
mother-in-law, pupils, colleagues and neighbours. Jane Taubman summarises the films technique
under the rubric of Soviet Apocalypse:

Asthenic Syndrome confronts and challenges the viewer, continually frustrating narrative
expectations. Seemingly unstructured, it is built from a series of episodes involving and
observed by her two main characters, which add up to a portrait of the era. The episodes
form two stylistically distinct narratives, linked thematically by the psychological and

11
physical syndrome from which both characters suffer and structurally by rhyming images
and episodes (Taubman 2005, 46).

The overall effect is of a society breaking apart under the stresses of so many human antagonisms.
Yet the film collapses this antagonism, and the question of cause or consequence, into an
apparently aporetic condition. Produced within the Soviet Union at the time of its final
disintegration, it does not since it cannot account for the conditions in any definable historical
sense. It is neither retrospective nor prophetic and as such is not strictly apocalyptic. The
traditional apocalyptic couplet of already and not yet is suspended in the film whose only means is
to express itself from the midst of crisis, in a stark, brutal and alienating world marked by cruelty,
decay and helplessness, against which it can evidence no escape. All of this it delivers with an acute
fictional realism combined with documentary record. Fictional scenarios are integrated with and
within documentary mise-en-scne most explicitly in a school visit to the city pound for stray
dogs: the actors, like the audience, forced into direct contact with those animals in cages awaiting
death. What is crucially missing from this apocalypse now is the narrative and prophetic
structure that identifies an agent of salvation and the vision of a redeemed state: that which is
always to come, the announcement and the image of the future, that gives the apocalyptic its
proper and complete register (McGinn 1998: 36).
Twice over (at least) Muratova seems to question the possibility of redemption, its very
concept, whether secular or religious. Early in the film, three old women lament the failure of the
great Tolstoyan legacy to redeem the masses through the moral mission of art. Thereafter, the
films final scene presents the suggestive and simultaneously corrupted image of its narcoleptic
protagonist, the bearded, kenotic Nikolai, posed as in crucifixion and asleep on a Moscow subway
train as it transports him into the tomb-like darkness of a tunnel. Such a loaded Christological
form recalls its pictorial inheritance as the redemptive symbol of the Western world but one now
seemingly stripped of any apparent narrative or doctrinal means, either political or religious, to
achieve such a state. Through this combination of recognisable symbols and their apparent
ineffectiveness Muratovas film appears poised between identifying of the formula for a vanished
salvation, as Vladimirsky suggests, and a nihilistic turn to absurdity and hopelessness that has been
argued elsewhere (see Roberts 1999).

12
Muratova, however, insists through her choice of title on a shift of emphasis from the
narrative to the conditional or symptomatic. She has characterised the titular syndrome as being a
condition of nervous exhaustion, resulting in inappropriate behaviour or lack of affect (in
Taubman 2005: 45). It is a condition akin to a sickness and one that the film attributes not just to
individuals but also to the society as a whole. Its symptoms infect all society, all humanity.
Muratova has added when commenting on the film, Mankind is everywhere, in general, the
same. I see in the world a level of suffering and cruelty that surpasses understanding (in Taubman
2005: 45). Putting aside speculation about an authors personal disposition, two questions
resonate. The first asserts the fact and necessity of looking prior to an image of understanding, or a
currency of images in a relationship of understanding. The second is the assertion of a sickness in
terms of the human condition depicted. This, in itself, folds back into the question of looking: it is
as an act of symptomatology, of showing the symptoms, rather than as diagnosis that Muratova
conveys a human condition in conflict with itself.
Whichever side of the Russian soul to which Muratova might be said to incline a soul
Nikolai Berdiav, the great historian of the Russian psyche, proclaimed to be forever split by a
search for God and a militant godlessness among so many contradictions (in Kovalov 1999: 12)
the film demands to be seen as more than a one-sided commentary on the historical mise-en-scne of
a collapsing Communist infrastructure or a mere refraction through the lens of a particular film-
makers apparent disillusion.
Certainly Muratova depicts a seemingly pervasive condition of human frailty and
contradiction with no demonstrable image or figure of salvation. However, through its titular
pathology, its symptomatic signs of exhaustion and fractured descriptions of random cruelty and
abuse, the film testifies to a humanity that is apparently sick, and therefore positions itself in
respect to a demand for something like redemption or salvation, above and beyond any more
rational, humanist or political terms of improvement that might lie within the means of human
competence and cinematic narrative. It is this withdrawal of any humanist or psychological
formula that places redemption beyond any humanly autonomous reach. The title, underscored by
so many seemingly illusory symbols of redemption, from the Christ figure of Nikolai to the failure
of art to move an audience, poses the question of where or in what form human existence may
find the means to extract itself from such pervasive antagonism, when the traditional structures of
rhetorical redemption are so clearly under stress. From within this unflinching depiction of

13
wretchedness, cruelty and suffering, The Asthenic Syndrome begins to echo the terms of the
fallibility that is at the heart of the Christian doctrine of the Fall: the consequence of original sin
that sees all of humanity as essentially degraded. Human beings then, are not only capable of sinful
acts but actually disposed towards them and against what is good through their very condition of
being human. Accordingly, in the model of the Fall it is only through Christ that the original state
of bliss can be restored. It is this configuration to which the film enigmatically alludes at the very
same time as it corrupts it. However, a reduction of the film to an expression of meaninglessness
or absurdity would seem to impoverish interpretation. Such reduction merely claims that the
failure to measure the social catastrophe the film depicts against existing paradigms prescribes a
collapse into hopelessness or nihilism. However, the fact that Nikolai is asleep rather than dead
when he enters the tunnel, together with the films continual provocations directed at its audience
to wake up, to properly look at the ever-present contradiction of the human condition suggests a
suspension and an exhortation that resists both a misanthropic nihilism and cynical exploitation of
the cruel and barbaric.
The films denial of a ready-to-hand formula for redemption, either for any of its
individual characters or their society as a whole, is, at the same time, coupled with a denial of an
absolute descent into nothingness. The act of insisting upon the showing of such images, and we
might be tempted to think of them as confessional since Muratova is herself part of the humanity
depicted in its most dire situation, is invested with an urgency and necessity. In the midst of the
images of condemned dogs in cages awaiting death Muratova inserts the provocative caption,
People dont like to look at this. People dont like to think about this. This should have no
relation to discussions of good and evil. The film asserts the necessity to show but in terms that
resist the determination of a lesson or recourse to the textual paradigms of allegory or fable.
Rather, it projects its images to the spectator, not as a code to be deciphered, but as images to be
reflected upon in relation to their origin in the world and in dialogue with the self. Such are the
minimal terms of the search for salvation that Vladimirsky detects.
It may be objected that the rejection of so many redemptive symbols in The Asthenic
Syndrome merely points to their evident impossibility under conditions more akin to the Freudian
diagnostic of ineradicable evil (Bernstein 2002: 132). Repressed instincts buried in the human
subconscious can never be fully eliminated and should not be confused with original sin since they
are in no way attributable to a Fall or the result of a Free Will (even that of the original human

14
pair). Nevertheless, what separates the concept of original sin from that of instinct is its
fundamental maintenance of the possibility of a cure, however wretched, sick or unredeemable the
evidence seems to be. In a further contradiction, and despite Muratovas pessimism regarding the
moral efficacy of art, the act of filming remains, as a contact between image and world, a possible
transformative source, irrespective of whether an image of redemption is attainable or otherwise.
Stephen Mulhall outlines the relationship between sickness and original sin in a study
of the lingering resonance of the Christian doctrine of the Fall in secular philosophy of the
twentieth century (Mulhall: 2005a). In it he draws attention to a statement made by Ludwig
Wittgenstein:

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect
as sick. Anyone who is halfway decent will think himself utterly imperfect, but only the
religious person thinks himself wretched (in Mulhall 2005a: 7).

Mulhall goes on to elaborate the distinction. A natural imperfection within the human condition,
such as a raw component that requires nurturing, or imperfections that are the result of structures
of social (political, economic) or biological (genetic, psychological) realms, do not lie outside of
the human race and therefore, according to rationalist or Enlightenment thinking, the solutions
ultimately lie within the scope of human action or intelligence. The doctrine of the Fall, by
contrast, locates all immoral acts in the hands of the original human pair: the concept of original
sin, or the overreaching of humankind to a status of knowledge equal with the divine; a
knowledge that provides for the decisive freedom to choose evil over good. It then withdraws any
solution from the possibilities of human perfectibility to place it in a realm outside of human
achievement. Crucially, the contrary immorality of so many human actions (and the twentieth
century offers a litany of the atrocities of which humankind is capable) determines a human
condition that is essentially capable of being wrong, not only, as Mulhall puts it, in particulars,
but in everything we do, and hence that nothing we initiate can right that wrong unless it is
rooted in a moment of passivity, one in which we suffer the supplementation of an essential lack
(Mulhall 2005a: 10).
Mulhall argues that the theme of redemption remains present in secular philosophies and
makes case studies of the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Such examples

15
recognise a continental attitude to philosophy that is content to integrate literary, aesthetic and
religious modes of discourse into its conceptual framework. These philosophers are inclined to see
inherent contradictions in the phenomenon of existence, to the extent that contradiction is the
distinctly human characteristic. Each philosopher, Mulhall argues, retains the resolution that the
human condition is structurally perverse and resistant to its own grasp, and yet each is resolutely
opposed to a divine source of transformation. As such, We stand incomprehensibly in need of
redemption, and we are incomprehensibly able to achieve it, through a certain kind of intellectual
practice that is also a spiritual practice [] a practice of enduring and embodying the human
beings constitutive resistance to its own grasp (Mulhall 2005a: 12).
This incomprehensibility is what makes itself evident in the space that Vladimirsky opens
up in Muratovas film: the tension that surrounds the reflection that at the same time the film
cannot believe in the possibility of salvation and yet, through its indignant act of showing it calls
upon salvation in its refusal of all historical, and as such, man-made, paradigms of redemption. In
effect, The Asthenic Syndrome and this is the observation that will be carried over to the films of
Tarr, Seidl, Andersson, Van Sant, et al. presents this embodiment and endurance of human
contradiction at the limits of representation and signification. This limit situation will enable, as
the following chapters will show, a rethinking of a mode of cinematic address informed by the
expression of sense developed by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy; a configuration of experience
that places itself between any transcendent condition of possibility and all empirical
determinations of meaning. Nancy states that, the element of sense is a reality indiscernibly and
simultaneously empirical and transcendental, material and ideative, physical and spiritual (quoted
in James 2006: 240 n.13). In addition, his integration of sense into an aesthetic relation
(extended in his writing to specific contemplation of the cinema) will allow for a renewed
configuration of the concept of cinematic realism (Chapter Four). Furthermore, sense,
considered through the principle of methexis (a form problem that fully encapsulates a range of
sensory associations in terms of participation, sharing and contagion) that Nancy applies vis--vis
the artwork will help to illuminate aspects of the films that expose the spectator to a certain
confessional element, the offering of truths embedded in the evident, real and material: that which
is embodied in the films effect (Chapter Five).
What we find in Muratovas rejection of the narrative expression of redemption or
reconciliation, either as Tolstoyan moral argument or Christological myth, is a continued

16
insistence on testimony, in terms akin to revelation or disclosure, as the primary mode of
cinematic address. In Muratovas specific case this is both a form of documentary witness (as with
the condemned dogs in the city pound) and an enunciation through creation, oriented towards the
cruel, barbaric, violent and destructive. It is a presentation and an act of insistence both prior to,
and in excess of, the interpretative faculties of cause and effect or the proposition of reason. The
film resists adopting any position regarding the status of redemption, picking up its clues or
formulating its denials, either of which remains entangled in narrative configurations of
redemptive formulae. Instead, and returning to the broader conviction of this thesis, The Asthenic
Syndrome stands as the first of several films that emerge in the decade or so that follows the
collapse of the Soviet Union to place this enigmatic limit situation of redemption at their centre.
It is a stance that necessarily problematises redemptions traditional paradigms, particularly those
configured around violence. Violence, here, is defined in the general sense of a destructive force
(event, condition, person or persons) exerted on a situation, and forms the most explicit image of
human fallibility, immorality, antagonism and contradiction. Violence and antagonism, and the
enigmatically corrupted society emerge as the most emphatic marks of the persistently conflicting
nature of the human experience. It is the human condition itself that comes under scrutiny as
being fundamentally in contradiction to its own best interests and for which violence is a
propensity more than a measure, a pervasive condition beyond the misdeeds of individual agents.
This is not to deny the significance of the films historical context. It is certainly
reasonable to read these films in relation to the collapse of European communism and a crisis of
capitalism. The divisive aspects of the capitalist system are pre-eminent, whether they are imminent
(in the immediate post-Soviet context of Russia and Eastern Europe) or immanent (in the broader
context of its universal dominance as a form of life in Western Europe and the US). Nevertheless,
there remains the condition of being human itself, integral to the symptomatic social, economic
and communal structures to which human beings subject themselves. It is this human condition
that is essentially fallible.
References to fallibility and the state of fallenness should not be taken to mean that The
Asthenic Syndrome, or any of the other films outlined above, is determined by a religious way of
thinking. None of them offers religious themes in the sense of giving narrative or pictorial
representations of traditional Biblical dogma. Nevertheless, they can be characterised by a
persistent, enigmatic and provocative reiteration of religious motifs and symbols ranging from

17
apocalyptic prognostications, messianic figures and apparent Holy Fools to corrupted religious
iconography and resurrected dead. All of which points, at the very least, to a recognition that the
secular is not free from the spectre of sin wherever a rational solution is not readily at hand in the
midst of so many violent and destructive scenarios. In a double-bind, the films then undercut
those same symbols, such that the religious terms of reference may themselves be the cause,
rather than the solution, of the apparent wretchedness in evidence. As such, by filming events
without recourse to decisive narrative, political or religious strategies, it is redemption from the
normative terms of redemption that ultimately constitutes the primary question.
Stephen Mulhalls reading of key thinkers in twentieth century philosophy finds the locus
of redemption in the relation between an intellectual practice that is also a spiritual practice
(Mulhall 2005a: 12), the terms of which form the debate. What is at stake, and hence the
justification of the terms of redemption above and beyond those humanly self-sufficient modes of
discourse, is the initial conception of a human condition that has relinquished the means of its own
freedom to become enslaved by its own self; in short, humankind has placed its recovery beyond
its own reach (Mulhall 2005a: 9). For Nietzsche, this is to be found in the commitment to
Christianity itself. For Heidegger, productionist metaphysics systematically turns humankind away
from taking an interest in the true nature of all things. For Wittgenstein, it is the human beings
linguistic inheritance that subverts the humanity it brings into being (Mulhall 2005a: 118-120). It
is then, through the recognition of moments of passivity that bring forth a realisation of a
supplementation an intellectual practice that is also a spiritual practice that a lack may be
recognised.
Such contemplation chimes with certain aesthetic conceptions of the cinema, especially
those that evoke its revelatory or reconciliatory potential (a central theme in the writings of Andr
Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer) and the ability of its passive apparatus to reach beyond the screen
of symbolic representations towards something like a real condition of existence. At the same
time, as the critics of Bazin and Kracauer were keen to point out, such a formula also characterises
the cinema as the purveyor of illusions and deceptions derived from a reductive equivalence of
perception to ideology (Stam et al. 1992: 187) that contributes to the conception of a human
nature that is always already diverting itself from a relation to truth and understanding. Both the
cinema and the conditions it presents become the combinatory site of a structurally perverse,
corrupted or fallen state. Such is the fundamental contention of Jean-Luc Godards Histoire(s) du

18
cinma (1989-98). However, at the same time, Godard maintains that the cinema is redeemable or
transformative, not from any prescribed transcendental source, but from within. At its core is an
essentially intellectual cinematic practice that is also a spiritual practice in its recovery of a realism
based on a cinematic contact between image and world. This particular position, and Jean-Luc
Nancys subtle distinction from it is the principle focus of Chapter Three.
Mulhalls account of the distinctive undercurrents of the fallen and the redemptive in
Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein identifies three principle consistencies and recurrences. In
the first place there is the idea of God as nothing, as no thing or a non-entity. To conceive of a
God as something in particular, whether affirming or denying a divine existence, and to allow for
any conceptual characteristics is to lapse into superstition or idolatry. Secondly, there is the
question of a linguistic confusion, an opacity in our life with words, as a marker of our
perverseness, most evident in a certain deconstructive manoeuvre that calls into question and
thereby collapses the traditional relations of signifier and signified. Thirdly, there is the idea of an
unending oscillation between experiencing our condition as a limit and as a limitation. This last,
Mulhall says in terms that can be heard to chime with the rhetoric of an ontologically realist idea
of the cinemas relation to the world implies the distinguishing of the necessary from the
contingent as a spiritual as well as a logical matter (Mulhall 2005a: 14).
A consistently similar set of guiding themes or dominant unifying characteristics can not
only be recognised in The Asthenic Syndrome but also reflected in the films of Tarr, Andersson,
Seidl, Van Sant, et al. The recurrent corruption of Christian symbols and doctrines points to a
secular, at times anti-religious, loss of faith, an abandonment of the transformational powers
invested in the images and iconography of organised religion that critiques their continued
resonance within contemporary culture. The terms of language are two-fold: the necessity of
showing rather than telling in forms of accumulative montage that deny the conventions of
cinematic language (of clear exposition and interpretation) is coupled to a short-circuit of
diegetic language, of human communication that falters and fails and is reduced to silences,
endless banalities of daily life, swearing and cursing, incoherent rambling and provocative
accusation in place of exposition, justification or psychological determination. The act of
showing and its elevation of the shot (as an accumulation of signifiers or an excess of signification
in the image) is preferred to a rational, dialectic or cause-and-effect related articulation and
economy of meaning, one that would prioritise montage and traditional editing logic as a locus of

19
meaning. Instead, these films emphasise the notion of the shot itself as the site and limit situation
of signification.
Mulhalls study provides a background of transferable themes that resonate with the
human condition presented in these films. This thesis makes no claims to evaluate the terms or
implications of Mulhalls philosophical study. The point is, rather, that a sensing of the persistent
overtones of a dogged and deeply provocative tradition provides the inspiration for unlocking
particular aspects of the films outlined above and, moreover, can be found to evoke and re-
energise certain film-theoretical discourses, notably those with both realist and transcendental
perspectives. Furthermore, the thinkers with whom Mulhall engages, Nietzsche and Heidegger
especially, remain central to the context of post-history. The critical and philosophical
discourses so influential to the present era, cast most often as post-modernity (and out of which
these films emerge), derive from these thinkers. It is from them that the proposition of an end or
exhaustion of metaphysics that underpins the phenomenon of endism generally can be traced.
Their influence can be found behind a range of announcements of an end to such concepts as
history, ideology, grand narratives, modernity, Marxism, humanism or religion (Sim 1999: 12).
The real or theoretical collapse of so many teleological structures and binary oppositions
is a crucial factor in the relationship between contemporary realist oriented films and the world to
which they refer. Some films emerged directly from within the Communist Blocs agonising
demise and eventual conversion to the Western free-market economy, others from within that
economy. In both situations the status of the capitalist system in the midst of these historical
events had taken on a heightened rhetorical resonance. It found its apogee in Francis Fukuyamas
controversial, apocalyptic, and now largely anachronistic declaration of triumphant liberal
democracy, The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992. Fukuyamas declaration of an
end to particular conceptions of History as forms of evolutionary, or even eschatological,
processes working towards specific ideological goals has been well documented. In his opinion,
the end of European communism signalled the apocalypse now, the arrival of the best possible
solution to the human problem (in Sim 1999: 21): universal liberal democracy. Present social
inequalities were simply a matter of delay as developing nations caught up economically and
politically with a fully liberal-democratic, free-market system. The question of a people the
paradigm whose emancipation or mythic unification had underpinned totalitarianisms both
communist and fascist is buried in the general exchange equivalence of an abstracted

20
democracy. However towards the close of his book, the scattered masses reappear as a
reiteration of the Old Testament problem, as it is the last men themselves that become the
systems only potential threat: The life of the last man is one of physical security and material
plenty, and therefore, Fukuyama asks, is there a danger that we will be happy on one level, but
still dissatisfied with ourselves on another, and hence ready to drag the world back into history
with all its wars, injustice, and revolutions? (in Sim 1999: 22).
Muratovas film (and all of those discussed in this thesis) confounds any such premonitions
of a new or existing world order formulated and operated on the basis of a victorious free-market
ideology. Such confidence is dispelled under the weight of a more fundamental human condition
mired in selfishness, indifference and sudden, rupturing violence; on physical acts dislocated from
evident motives and operating in an apparent spiritual vacuum. None of which is an apology for a
socio-political system whose weak link is its populace. Rather, it is the question of the systems
failing the people or the people failing the systems that cuts to the heart of the conditions of
human suffering; of a human interaction laced with so many debilitating consequences, as the
people seek to cope with, endorse or prop up the systems of their own creation.
Each of the films highlighted, in some way, contains cases of mental and physical
breakdown, along with alcoholism, abusive rage, outbursts of violence and helpless malaise that
can lead to suicide. Collectively, the content of all of these films is driven by an underlying threat
of violence or destruction. Once again, such content is cut loose from the interpretative
frameworks for these conditions and is presented through an observational catalogue of the
symptoms of a pervasive wretchedness, an apparent sickness stripped of the articulation of a cure.
In a recent study of violence, Slavoj Zizek has sought to separate what he calls the subjective
violence (that attributed to individual protagonists) from a deeper objective violence that silently
underpins the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems (Zizek 2009: 1). It is a
sickness made evident through a symptomatology of violence, antagonism, destruction and decay
through which these films communicate.
In terms of their formal strategies, these films present their accumulation of pervasive
sickness through a disjointed, episodic and purely descriptive formula employed at the expense of
more prescriptively developed forms of editing logic, including certain modernist modes of
subjective or subject-oriented discourse. Moreover, what is striking about them is their elevation
of the conditions of suspense. They create an excess of suspense, continually deferring narrative

21
momentum and withholding revelation; continually resisting the completion of any narrative or
interpretative strategy. Collectively they favour a stark, forensic use of the cinematic shot (either
as lengthy, complex sequence or studied, individual tableau). They assemble fragmentary
structures depicting multiple, often unconnected characters. Where the focus is on particular
individuals or integrated groups, they withdraw the traditional modes of empathy and subjectivity:
reaction shots, point-of-view shots. The overall technique is one that accentuates the accumulative
effect of the shots over and above the integrity of a determined, conceptual discourse. In what
might be described as an excess of looking and lingering, the films harbour this impassive suspense
determined by the force of presentation: a staring into the face of human folly, cruelty, barbarity,
and its helplessness and suffering in the manner of a painting by Bosch or Bruegel. Yet what takes
the place of the traditional signs of redemption is the limit situation of the movement towards a
redemptive possibility. The trajectory of symbolic redemption is replaced by the tense hiatus of
suspense left by the withdrawal of fallibilitys overcoming in the terms configured by the cinemas
linear movement. At the extreme, films such as The Asthenic Syndrome, Stntang, and Elephant
deliberately confront the terms of their own endings as a change of register. They create formal
shifts (distinct from open-ended forms of character-oriented narrative) that allude to an
interruption of the possibility of producing narrative. Instead, the images are positioned as an
allusive demand for something more than the traditional interpretative models are seemingly able
to provide, be they narrative, political or religious.
However, there is no claim being made that the films of Muratova, Tarr, Seidl,
Andersson, Van Sant and others demonstrate a uniquely radical change in cinematic style.
Certainly their fundamental techniques can be traced through a lineage of earlier styles, notably
the tendency towards the formal motifs of the passive, distanced camera and the sequence shot
that is a legacy of post-war modernism, though it equally recalls the very earliest of the (so-called)
primitive or pre-narrative cinema of monstration prior to 1910. Such stylistic methods are
also central to the work of key directors found in a range of contemporary cinema, most notably
from directors in the Middle East and Asia in the work of Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hisao-
hsien, Jia Zhang-ke and Hirokazu Kore-eda, for instance. Crucially, however, these Eastern
film-makers refuse the images of degradation, violence and catastrophe that are central to the
Western films. The manner in which Kiarostami treats the catastrophe of a major earthquake in
Life and Nothing More (1992), Kore-eda refers to the aftermath of a mass killing by an apocalyptic

22
cult in Distance (2003), and Jia documents the effects of the destruction of villages to make way for
the Three Gorges Dam project in Still Life (2006) speaks of a marked difference in approach,
orientation and disposition. What is so apparent in these films, distinct from their Western
counterparts, is a sense of passing, of time moving on, with, in each case, human protagonists
integrated into this all-consuming passage, not driven by traditional Western dramaturgical forces
or conventions (to find redemption or be redeemed, to succeed or fail in some given act or
principle); in short, they are oriented towards co-existing rather than overcoming. They do not
circulate, as the Western films do, around the redemptive economy of Christological, sacrificial,
sanctified or Heavenly symbols and motifs, suspending and awaiting future events. Instead they are
inclined to play on the continuance and intentionlessness of a passage through life or some part of
it. It is a play that Jean-Luc Nancy has highlighted in a commentary dedicated to the style and the
title of Kiarostamis Life and Nothing More. Nancy emphasises the titles French translation, And Life
Goes On (Nancy 2001, 58) in this respect; a play reiterated in the titles Distance, and that chosen for
English translation, Still Life.
What is distinctive in the Western films, by contrast, is their explicit dwelling within and
suspending of, both the immanence and imminence of the violent and destructive and the
structural hiatus that encapsulates this suspension. Rather than passing through an eternal flux,
these films dislocate the events of rupture from their narrative models and at the same time
problematise their own structural ends. As a result they create a hiatus in the rhetoric of ends
and new beginnings that characterises the Western redemptive attitude.
With this in mind, it is not so much a matter of describing or labelling a new or additional
form of cinematic style or adding to what might already be the continual identification of time-
images in the manner of Gilles Deleuzes taxonomy of cinematic signs. Such a preoccupation with
labelling and semiotic categorisation already speaks of a Western fascination with images in
themselves, as meaning or concept, and the circulation of representations. Whether the films in
question are stylistically beholden to modernist or post-modernist techniques is of little
consequence. Rather, it is a question of the relation the images bear to the world they inhabit,
which formed and informed them, and which informs the narrative structures and sense-making
systems of Western social and historical conditions. It is a question of whether certain doctrinal
legacies of the Western approaches to thought and to being human retain a currency in these
films disposition towards the western world, and most notably, the presence of violence in its

23
broadest, conditional sense. It is here that symbolic and narrative links between violence and
redemption are located, in the soteriological mythology of a religion imbued with violence,
sacrifice, and human fallibility, that has also provided the cinemas central myth in the binary of
redemption through violence. It is this myth that these films ultimately confront.
This confrontation, or the interruption of the myth of fallibility, and a progression from
violence to redemption, leads towards the final readings of the outlined films that are informed by
the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancys principal themes of transimmanence (the interruptive
relation of the symbolic to the phenomenological) and of syncopation (the alternation of
presentation and withdrawal that directs all philosophical and aesthetic gestures) provide the
orientations for exploring the questions set out at the beginning: (i) that of the symbolism evident
in each of the films; (ii) their relation to a wider post-historical context; and (iii) the locus of
redemption and a repositioning of the terms of a cinematic realism that retains a form of
redemptive demand in its insistence on embodying and enduring so many human contradictions.
Chapter One begins with question (i) and an outline of the key symbols at work in the
films of Tarr, Seidl, Andersson, Van Sant, Muratova, Aristakisyan, Sokurov, and Dumont. The
starting point for measuring these symbols comes from the work of Paul Ricoeur, in particular his
schematic for the symbolism of evil (Ricoeur 1967). Ricoeur attempts to provide a hermenuetic
recovery of the meaning of evil in relation to human experience. Beginning with a
phenomenological investigation of the relations between the voluntary and the involuntary in
human nature, he derives a fact of existence that combines the aspects of freedom and necessity
within free will around an inherent fallibility. Ricoeurs philosophy is formulated from within a
commitment to Christianity and, as such, retains its mythology in an attempt to recover a moral
philosophy. For Ricoeur, the human being is fallen. However, a structure of myth then proceeds
from defilement, through sin, to guilt as the movement of freedom to conscience. Ricoeurs
schematic symbolism allows for an account of the mythical symbols as they are consistent within
the films of the selected directors and therefore, provides the basis for establishing the currency of
violence, antagonism and redemption. However, it is in fact the interruption of such myths that
propels the subsequent enquiry, derived from Jean-Luc Nancys critique of the insufficiency of
myths to properly account for existence an enquiry that has led him to locate Christian
mythology as the driving force of a broader metaphysical impasse.

24
Chapter Two, focusing on question (ii), attempts to contextualise this impasse what
Nancy has subsequently termed the deconstruction of Christianity (Nancy 2008b: 139) as a
means to move away from Ricoeurs Christian-centred symbolism to a non-religious configuration
of the continuing symbols of that tradition. This chapter explores the relationship with post-
history, working from the Christian legacy within nihilism, through Jacques Derridas
contemplation of teleological structures and the concept of a hauntology put forward in Specters
of Marx, to Nancys overarching philosophy of sense. Nancy rejects Christianity and follows both
Heidegger and Derrida in a deconstructive approach that also attempts to reposition the mythic
structure of symbols, through their interruption, incompleteness and excess, as a formula for an
always already being-in-the-world a form of realism that can inform the aesthetic.
Chapter Three, in response to question (iii), sets out the initial terms by which the cinema
itself has become the locus of an aesthetic redemption. It takes as its starting point Jean-Luc
Godards Histoire(s) du cinma (1989), in which Godard in something like a hermeneutic recovery
of lost meaning after Ricoeur announces The Image will come at the Resurrection. Godards
film, along with both practical and theoretical accounts by Chris Marker, Guy Debord, Gilles
Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, sets out to right the wrongs of history and to settle cinemas
accounts, that is, to reassert the real of the image and the dialectic of montage as a truth behind
the power politics of history. This discussion serves to introduce the relationship between
montage, as the necessary and inevitable articulation of cinematic meaning, and the cinematic shot
itself in relation to the world it depicts. Such works revolve around the rescuing of a true
cinematic image from its corruption in a century of stories. Fascinated by images and their
ideological representations, these practitioners and theorists insist on montage as the means to
explode the traditions imposed through the terms of narrative and historical realism. However,
behind their questioning of the terms of the real is the assertion that it is the real that must be
emancipated if the cinema is to be redeemed. Jacques Rancires analysis of cinema is recalled,
since he challenges the determinedly reflexive discourse present to argue that the cinematic image
always already contains the means to its own deconstruction. Also, these projects (whose
accountable histories terminate in the 1980s) propose an end of history: a summation of the
twentieth century that is synthesised with the century of cinema. Such a perspective
overemphasises the binary conditions of a cinema history linked to an oppositional stance between
a classical Hollywood and an anti-narrative Europe that is also a politics of

25
capitalism/communism. It is the years that follow the collapse of European communism that this
thesis addresses through the proposition that it is a certain relationship to cinematic realism rather
than modes of narrative representation a presentation in respect of the real world, following
Nancy that is given a renewed urgency.
Chapter Four, then, develops Jean-Luc Nancys non-representational realism in relation
to the cinema and, in particular, points to his post-phenomenological perspective on the artwork
in distinction to the predominantly phenomenological approaches to realism in earlier film
theoretical discourse. A comparison is made with the realist issues that underpin works by Wim
Wenders and Werner Herzog; works that operate at the threshold of the historical and contextual
conundrum of modernism/post-modernism with stories of violence and fallibility. Nancys
perspective of the artwork as a fragment of experience or sense of the world is seen as reflected
in the approach of Herzog, who seeks to locate an irreducible experience of the sublime and the
everyday within the filmed image, as opposed to Wenders, whose meditations on the cinematic
image remain within the modernist framework of an opposition between the contingent, or real,
and the fictive, or narrative. The locus and function of the real in the films of Wenders and
Herzog follows a trajectory informed by the revelatory and redemptive functions attributed to
realism by the critics Andr Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer and the spiritual and mystical aspects
of realism present in the theories developed by Paul Schrader and Gilles Deleuze. The
consequence, however, is to propose that, despite the stylistic similarities between the films of a
realist/modernist aesthetic and those of the post-historical films of Muratova, Seidl, Andersson,
Tarr, and Van Sant, the formula for such critique, with its attempts to shore up either an
existential existence of the subject or an ahistorical ground of the real, each with an underlying
redemptive or utopian function, is misaligned with the problems presented in the latter films. It
is, thereafter, through Jean-Luc Nancys particular mode of aesthetic presentation, of
transimmanence and syncopation, that a fragment of sense, or of world, without redemptive
claims but nevertheless retaining an insistence and a demand, comes closer to the operational
means of these films and to the affect of their content. These films present a felt contact with the
stress, distress and anxiety of their depicted conditions whilst creating cinematic conditions of
continual suspense that leaves such tensions unreleased. This insistence derives from the
recognition of situations prior to any developed means of diagnosis presenting a felt contact with
conditions of stress or distress whose tension remains unreleased.

26
Chapter Five explores Nancys formulae through a discussion of Gus Van Sants 2003 film
Elephant. Initially working from Pier Paolo Pasolinis analysis of the cinematic long take as the
primordial element of a cinematic present, the formal technique that drives Van Sants film, this
chapter identifies the films relationship with its specific historical event and details a series of
responses to that event from critical reviews, related films, and theoretical discourse that
Elephant eschews or withdraws from. This serves to introduce, via the themes identified by
Rancire, the aesthetic response to a cinema of looking as the opening onto sense put forward
by Jean-Luc Nancy. The terms of his approach to the cinema and to aesthetics and the artwork
more broadly are derived from a confluence of historical and theoretical conditions that shift the
ontological emphasis that underpins such aesthetics. In particular, Nancys recent development of
the term methexis (integrating its etymological linking of participation, sharing, contagion)
provides the underlying diagnostic reference for the affect of violence on screen, its attraction and
its retreat. Nancys approach seeks a fidelity to the real as such. As Laura McMahon writes: the
material and the transcendental are mutually interruptive of one another; opening onto this mode
of mutual interruption, here the cinema restates itself in its relation to the sense of the world its
truths embedded in the evident, the material, the real (McMahon 2010: 82). This fidelity
suggests a form of phenomenology of confession (as set out by Ricoeur) where the terms of
immorality and fallibility are dependent on the possibility of their recognition in consciousness
(Ricoeur 1967: 101). However, Nancy resists the unnecessary religiosity of this conception by re-
inscribing the opening of sense itself as the Open of proclamation (Nancy 2008c: 156): that
which directs sense or existence back to the receiver as a felt coexistence or shared recognition.
It is in our distress, Nancy has claimed, that we come to know our coexistence (in Lingis 1997:
197).
Chapters Six to Ten develop readings of particular films with respect to the diagnostic
principles set out above. They are categorised around the terms set out by Paul Ricoeur for the
symbolism of evil those of defilement, sin and guilt. Accordingly, Chapter Six explores Bruno
Dumonts Flanders through the image conjured by its title, of war as an historical stain or
defilement of the landscape. Contrary to the depiction of war through a genealogy of mythic
paradigms, Flanders suggests the spectre of war as a matter of sense interrupting the lives of the
landscapes occupants and, furthermore, interrupting the relation between war and destiny.

27
Chapter Seven continues the theme of stain or defilement, this time with respect to the
hauntology (in Derridas terms) of the lingering legacy, replete with violence, of the Soviet
century in the post-Soviet states. The Asthenic Syndrome is linked to Artur Aristakisyans Palms and
Alexander Sokurovs Russian Ark, through their differing but recurrent engagement with the theme
of the loss of vision. The Asthenic Syndrome, as already noted, confronts the possibility of salvation;
Palms addresses the obscuring of those people abandoned in the wake of communisms collapse;
and Russian Ark presents a vision of culture and its eclipse within history. Each film ultimately
emphasises vision not as the revelation of an idea but as the tension of its potential loss through
obscurity, forgetfulness or the oblivion of history.
Chapters Eight and Nine shift the symbolic emphasis from defilement to sin, where sin
comes about, in Ricoeurs terms, once a society has a concept of God (Simms 2003: 22). In
Chapter Eight, Bel Tarrs Stntang and Roy Anderssons Songs from the Second Floor present
conditions of sin antagonism, contradiction, violence that are bound by acts of impotence
that lead people towards a reliance on idolatry, false messiahs, and assorted pleas to transcendent
bodies. However, the failure of these metaphysical sources of salvation is less a descent into a
manifest nihilism than it is an exposure of the limit situation of nihilism and a necessary negativity
that exposes, or confesses to, the real of the experiential world.
Chapter Nine, focusing on Tarrs later film, Werckmeister Harmonies, compares the
apocalyptic overcoming of the non-human, or animal aspect of humanity (derived from the myth
of original sin) as presented in the 1967 film Quatermass and the Pit, with Tarrs film to suggest that
Tarr draws attention to the act of controlling the animal within the human as the opening of
sense as the recognition of the limits of signifying myth, and therefore to the suspension of the
traditional image of its overcoming.
Chapter Ten responds to the final element in Ricoeurs symbolism, that of guilt,
through two films by Ulrich Seidl, Dog Days and Import Export, and Roy Anderssons most recent
film, You the Living. Each film configures a series of impressions of guilt, of situations resonating
with, in Ricoeurs terms, our anticipation of punishment that accompanies our own sinful deeds
(in Simms 2003, 23). This is accentuated by their confessional style, their framing and
presentation of guilt, and the subjects effective suffering, not only within the context of character
experiences and situational vignettes, but also as a form of direct visual address that commits to a
sense of being-in-common between film and spectator.

28
In summary, this thesis aims to show that these films act as something like a confession
of the resistant and contradictory antagonisms and violence at the heart of human experience. This
is, however, stripped of any religious or scriptural connotations such that, following Jean-Luc
Nancy, it creates an opening onto sense as a presentation of the real of the world located around
a continual movement that denies the synthesis of traditional narrative forms. It remains a kind of
confession, in the most rudimentary sense of an utterance of man about himself (Ricoeur 1967:
4), since these films are fictions and not expressly acts of witnessing. Contrary to critiques of these
films that see them as reflecting only meaninglessness and misanthropy, the effect of this opening
onto sense is to give evidence of a necessary negativity. In opposition to a full rejection or
transformation of negativity, or any reifying positivity, these films seemingly in contradiction of
themselves maintain a demand oriented towards redemption. Such a redemption, as an aesthetic
practice, is reconfigured away from the representation of a debt to be repaid and towards a non-
representational realism that exposes, through the interruption and suspension of norms and
presuppositions, the instance of fallibility as coincident with the viewer exposed to the
impossibility of complete knowledge or transformation.

29
PART ONE

History, Context, Style

30
CHAPTER 1

Films of Fallibility: the Symbols of Evil and the Interruption of


Sin

This first chapter will focus on qualifying the various films listed in the introduction in
terms of their relation to the themes of human fallibility and its symbols. As already noted, each of
the films, by Muratova, Tarr, Andersson, Seidl, Van Sant, et al., is configured around various acts
of violent rupture or systemic antagonism and disruption. More particularly, however, such
events and conditions remain in each case innate, ineffable or else emerge from seemingly
inexplicable causes. In short, such disruptive events and situations effectively provide the
conditional locus of a human experience derived from contradiction, antagonism, conflict, and
suffering.
Each of the different films describes these acts, events, instances or situations of
disruption both in respect of, and in apparent resistance to, a series of symbolic images and themes
indicative of traditional, doctrinal, and narrative modes of redemption. These range from
Christological images such as the kenotic Nikolai in The Asthenic Syndrome, to the equally kenotic
figure of Irimas, the false messiah, in Stntang, and the corrupted plastic crucifixes at a sales
conference that recur in Songs from the Second Floor. Palms organises its impressions within a
Christian timeframe dating from the crucifixion of Christ, whilst Van Sants Last Days concludes
with an image of ghostly resurrection. Stntang, Werckmeister Harmonies, Songs from the Second
Floor, and You the Living each contain apocalyptic prognostications, sacrificial rites or versions of
catastrophic destruction that continue to evoke the apocalyptic within the secular. Dog Days, Import
Export, Palms, Flanders, Songs from the Second Floor and You the Living all make direct reference to sin
and human guilt.
In addition to so many specifically religious symbols, these films also contain certain
symbolic and narrative characteristics that resonate with redemptive references. Sickness and
wretchedness, selfishness and vengeful egos, the burdens of suffering, the trials of Job, long and
torturous journeys, the oblivion or limbo of lost souls remain consistent tropes in the mythic

31
paradigms of trials, tribulations, and redemption along with the cosmologically inflected symbols
of light and dark, sun and moon and vision and blindness.
Such a list of symbols is derived from those set out in an account of the mythic structures
of sin, guilt and fallibility more generally collated under the term evil in the work of the
French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur has developed a substantial body of texts directed at a
hermeneutic epistemology of foundational, mythic and narrative formulae. Particularly in work
initiated in the 1950s and 1960s, he addressed these symbols as they operated under the
conditional terms of good and evil. The key works, Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil (both
1960) applied initial dialectic and phenomenological approaches to the development of what
would later become Ricoeurs hermeneutic method. As Karl Simms points out, Ricoeur was and
remained a consistently, even overtly, Christian philosopher and, for this reason, the terms of
good and evil were central to his early explorations of the human dialectic of free will and
necessity (Simms 2003: 9). Ricoeurs hermeneutic method with regard to good and evil was to
identify the mythic symbols that, he asserted, provided the foundation for the human recognition
of the consciousness of evil and sin. That is, myths were the recognition of human fallibility and
the basis for its confrontation. In Ricoeurs thesis it is precisely because of myths that humankind
can be said to be fallen, since myths the foundational narratives of human existence, creation,
suffering, salvation; in short, origins and ends underscore an essential consciousness of human
fallibility. They are the intentional encoding of the mysterious experience of human fallibility.
In The Symbolism of Evil Ricoeur establishes a set of inter-related categories for the
conceptual movement of fallibility, through sin to guilt the effective movement from necessity
to consciousness. Within each category he sets out the type and function of particular myths that
are immediately recognisable in the above films. Ricoeurs categories account for the cosmological
and creation symbols of light and dark, sun and sky, horizons and distances, through the symbols
of journeys and deviations, missed targets, straying from paths, revolts and rebellions, lack and
suffering, vice and vengeful selves. From this list we can recall the journeys and obstacles that
structure Import Export and Flanders, the revolts and rebellions that irrupt in Werckmeister Harmonies,
Songs from the Second Floor, and Elephant, vice and vengeance at the heart of Stntang, Dog Days,
and Elephant, the lack and suffering of Palms, You the Living, The Asthenic Syndrome, and Dog Days,
and (for reasons to be elaborated in Chapter Seven) the oblivion and lost soul of Russian culture
that underpins Russian Ark.

32
Myths, for Ricoeur, mean not a false explanation by means of images and fables, but a
traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time and which has
the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men of today, and in a general manner,
establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world
(Ricoeur 1967: 5). Whether we accept this particular concept of myth is of less concern here than
the typology of the myths themselves. In fact, as we move towards Jean-Luc Nancys conception
of interrupted myths (Nancy 1991: 43) it will in fact be the very excess and lack of completion
of these myths that will be of more significance. However, at this point, Ricoeurs categories
provide the most resonant and explicit criteria for establishing the films initial provocations and
the formulae that they will ultimately make problematic.
To establish Ricoeurs categories in more detail, however, requires a slight detour
through the means by which he arrives at them. Karl Simms has summarised Ricoeurs methods
succinctly in an overview of the philosophers relevance for literary theory, and he sets out the
context for Ricoeurs overarching project: Ricoeurs philosophy is motivated by a Christian need
to explain the origins of evil in the world, and thus to answer the questions that this problem
carries with it, such as Why is there evil in the world?, and Why do people commit evil deeds?
(Simms 2003: 10).
Beginning from a phenomenological base, Ricoeur constructs a dialectic between the
involuntary and the voluntary between the will and the passions. Ricoeur isolates three modes of
willing: decision (the formation of an act or plan), movement (the carrying out of an action) and
consent (the acquiescence to necessity). Each of these modes involves the wills opposite
involuntary modes, which Simms highlights: the decision is tempered by motivation, the
movement of the body is tempered by involuntary motion, and consent is tempered by necessity
(Simms 2003: 12). The relevance of this phase is simply to establish the basis from which to
challenge the Cartesian cogito. The role of the involuntary is to locate the mystery that underpins
the sterility of the Cartesian claim to self-knowledge: the Ego must more radically renounce the
covert claim of all consciousness, must abandon its wish to posit itself, so that it can receive the
nourishing and inspiring spontaneity which breaks the sterile circle of the selfs constant return to
itself (in Simms 2003: 13). Simms summarises Ricoeurs intentions:

33
The Cartesian sees the person as divided into the body, which as an object has objective
experience, and a soul, which has subjective existence. In removing the distinction between
soul and body or, more precisely, in demonstrating that a soul is impossible, so long as
we are in the world, without a body Ricoeur unites the objective and the subjective
under the single heading of existence (Simms 2003: 13).

However, for Ricoeur, the problem of existence is not a philosophical problem but a mystery
where a mystery, unlike a problem, is not something to be solved but something to be
acknowledged as not requiring an answer, and as such relocates the problem to one of morals,
ethics or politics. The conditions of existence, derived from the conflicting modes of the voluntary
and the involuntary, generate the paradoxical mystery of what Ricoeur calls limit concepts
(Ricoeur 1966: 486). These configure the operations of specifically human freedoms that are
limited by their negative concepts derived from needs, habits, and emotions and which are
open to rejection.
Likewise, we will find that it is the notion of limits, or the limit situation, that forms the
locus of Jean-Luc Nancys perspective. The key difference of the latters approach, above and
beyond his rejection of the Christian infrastructure, is the claim that it is through an attention to
the terms of the limit situation itself that the provision of an opening onto human experience can
be established. For Ricoeur, it is, rather, a matter of the limit concept as the initiation of a
necessary recovery of meanings. Nancys important difference will become apparent with respect
to a reconfiguration of aesthetics from representation to presentation in the following chapters.
Ricoeur further develops his theme of existence along existentialist lines that lead to the
importance of representational symbols. He remains within the sphere of the Christian inflected
existentialism of Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers for whom God, being outside the world, does
not exist as such, and only human beings have existence because, unlike animals, for instance, they
have knowledge or consciousness of it. In Sartres materialist and therefore more atheist version of
existentialism whereby physical reality is the only reality meaningful existence is formed by
choice and decision (again only a human capacity). Sartres perspective influences Ricoeurs
position with respect to action, but essentially Ricoeur retains Jaspers perspective that
interpretation is of equal importance to action in forming human life (Simms 2003: 15).

34
Interpretation, then, leads Ricoeur to his hermeneutic recovery of the meaning of
symbols with respect to the problem of good and evil. It is as a result of the mystery of the
conflicting voluntary and involuntary aspects of human existence that humanity is fallible. This
mysterious, paradoxical conflict creates a fragile human being, one constantly struggling with the
discordant effects generated by the contradictions of voluntary and involuntary gestures. It is these
contradictions that give rise to humankinds fallibility and the possibility of evil. In effect, Ricoeur
is re-inscribing the concept of original sin, since the fallible nature of existence leads to the
possibility of immorality: the possibility of moral evil is inherent in mans constitution (Ricoeur
1965: 203).
This schema, derived from the hypothesis that the human being is structured through a
disjunction between will and necessity, leads to the ratio of fallibility (in Simms 2003: 16) a
kind of measure for the human beings fallibility located on a disproportionate relation of the self
to the self and the level of non-coincidence this generates. In Fallible Man, Ricoeur finds three
distinct ways in which this disproportion can be measured and from which the human beings
fragility is determined. These three ways are diagnosed as the imagination, or humankinds
reflection upon itself; character, formed by the various necessities associated with living in the
world, and feeling which is born out of human emotions (Ricoeur 1965). These characteristics
form the tension of free will, of the means to creativity and freedom, but also locate the inherent
potential for evil within humanity. Creativity and conflict determine the function of humanitys
constitution; the means of its existence. They form the basis of the human beings restlessness at
once creative and driven by the insatiability of desires but, at the same time, open to a negativity
that must be passed through in order to be affirmed. The fragility of the human being gives rise to
the fallibility that creates the capacity for evil in the world. It is finally, at this point, that Ricoeur
is able to make the connection with myths and symbols. Fallibility is acknowledged as the state of
being fallen through the avowal of this capacity for evil (Ricoeur 1965: 219).
Ricoeurs study, The Symbolism of Evil, represents this task of identifying and categorising
the symbols that constitute such an acknowledgement. Ricoeur then adopts a religious strategy,
what he terms a phenomenology of Confession (Ricoeur 1967: 3). By adopting the notion of
confession, he is building on the aspect of avowal that distinguishes an intellectual conscience from
innate bodily drives. As Simms suggests, in Ricoeurs thesis:

35
evil does not become evil from a phenomenological point of view [] until at least the
possibility of confessing it arises to consciousness. To put it the other way around, the
possibility of confession is already contained within an evil deed. This being so, evil is
known through symbols, since the symbols provide the material out of which the
confession is to be constructed (Simms 2003: 21).

In his continually schematic unfolding, Ricoeur identifies a further triumvirate to qualify these
symbols: defilement, sin and guilt.
Defilement which Ricoeur uses interchangeably with the word stain has a primordial
quality, more originary than sin. It has, he claims, been sublimated to the extent that it should be
understood less as an uncleanliness than as a symbolic dread of impurity or contamination. Thus
sublimated, it is essentially an ethical dread (Ricoeur 1967: 35). Such is Ricoeurs claim that
Dread of the impure and rites of purification are in the background of all our feelings and all our
behaviour relating to fault (Ricoeur 1967: 25). Defilement refers to the inexplicable, the
ineffable. It exposes the involuntary and the astonishing: Why are we astonished? Because we do
not find in these actions or events any point where we might insert a judgement of personal
imputation, or even simply human imputation; we have to transport ourselves into a
consciousness for which impurity is measured not by imputation to a responsible agent but to the
objective violation of an interdict (Ricoeur 1967: 27). Defilement retains a trace of an archaic or
cosmological inference, of the happenings of the world above and beyond the intentions of
individual agents. Much of its perceived evil takes the form of misfortune, suffering, sickness, and
death. Hence, the division between the pure and the impure ignores any distinction between the
physical and the ethical and follows a distribution of the sacred and the profane which has become
irrational for us (Ricoeur 1967: 27).
As an objective event, this defilement is something that infects by contact leading to a
subjective response that is of the order of Dread (Ricoeur 1967: 27-28). However, a key shift in
the presentation of dread is the link Ricoeur makes to the primordial connection of vengeance
with defilement (Ricoeur 1967: 28). This is posited as the oldest human memory and one that
distinguishes an ethical dread from a basic physical fear (Ricoeur 1967: 28). Ethical dread
inscribes evil within the realm of suffering. Physical suffering is provided with an ethical rationale
in the mode of anxiety.

36
The awakening of an anxiety, in particular relating to vengeance or punishment leads to
sin. Once again, Ricoeurs configuration is determined by a theistic perspective founded on the
moral authority of a transcendent idea or entity (Ricoeur 1967: 51). Sin comes about once a
society has developed a concept of God and at this primordial stage can equally apply to
monotheistic or polytheistic representations. As Ricoeur puts it, a first conceptualization of sin
radically different from that of defilement is outlined on the symbolic level: missing the mark,
deviation, rebellion, straying from the path do not so much signify a harmful substance as a
violated relation (Ricoeur 1967: 74). Ricoeurs breakdown of the types and terms of this
violation is admirably meticulous and he stresses the need to avoid overly simplifying it to an
arbitrary moral law or legislative and judicial power, that is, or is not, adhered to (Ricoeur 1967:
55). As an ethical injunction, he suggests that it should rather be seen as this infinite demand that
creates an unfathomable distance and distress between God and man (Ricoeur 1967: 55).
Distance and distress underpin the plea for justice that accompanies the suffering and trials of
defilement. In the face of defilement, such as the suffering of disasters, there is no apparent means
of redress. A resort to ritual follows as an attempt to pre-empt such disasters. In moving away
from a human relation to the external world, via ritual, to one that begins to recognise the self-
questioning of humankind, the question of the absence or silence of the Gods emerges. The key
moment in the development of sin Ricoeur locates in the Hebrew Covenant (Ricoeur 1967: 50).
It is in a preliminary dimension of encounter and dialogue that there can appear such a thing as
the absence and the silence of God, corresponding to the vain and hollow existence of man
(Ricoeur 1967: 50). The establishment of a covenant produces sin as its violation. The process of
shifting meaning that Ricoeur attempts to recover is not a change of symbols but a change in the
perception of symbols that reveals a movement from objectivity to subjectivity: in rising from the
consciousness of defilement to the consciousness of sin, fear and anguish did not disappear; rather,
they changed their quality. It is this new quality of anguish that constitutes what we call the
subjective pole of the consciousness of sin (Ricoeur 1967: 63).
This movement has an effect on the symbolism of sin. Where the symbolism of defilement
was a contamination or infection, a contact with an external, representational something hence
the sense of stain the symbols of sin shift to those of the rupture of a relation. Nevertheless,
Ricoeur argues, the symbolism of sin retains an element of the something of an external reality
a power that lays hold of man (Ricoeur 1967: 70). This power takes on the space of a certain

37
nothingness an ontological ground or foundation that is the loss of the bond. Redemption,
therefore, becomes integral to sin as the restitution of a lack the symbolism itself is not
complete unless it is considered retrospectively from the point of view of the faith in redemption
(Ricoeur 1967: 71). Moreover, this symbolic transition and the integral role of redemption alters
the perspective from one that is spatial a defilement in the here and now that demands to be
rectified to return the here and now to a temporal movement: the symbol passes over from
space to time; the way is the spatial projection of a movement that is the evolution of a destiny
(Ricoeur 1967: 74).
Sin remains partially external or objective, it is at once primordially personal and
communal (Ricoeur 1967: 83). Where defilement takes place through the intervention of some
kind of external body or force, sin is a shared, communal and public symbolisation of the fallibility
of humankind. This leaves the third aspect of Ricoeurs overall configuration, that of guilt, which
moves the communal to the fully subjective or personal. Guilt is the projection of the recognition
of a sin, an anticipation of the chastisement that is internalised and therefore weighs on the
consciousness (Ricoeur 1967: 35). This is what leads to the most radical overhaul of the notion of
evil for Ricoeur, the movement from the experience of evil as a defilement, an external, real
effect, to an anxiety within the use of liberty and freedom and the simultaneous consciousness of
this condition (Ricoeur 1967: 102). Guilt underpins Ricoeurs sense of what is truly confessional.
As Karl Simms neatly paraphrases it: in defilement I accuse another, in sin I am accused, but in
guilt I accuse myself (Simms 2003, 23). Guilt marks the shift from an all-encompassing sin for
which humanity is guilty before God to a notion of the degree of evil or sin in relation to other
people: from the religious to the ethical. Simms stresses an important point regarding the role of
symbolism. Having established a route away from the religious to the ethical, it may seem as if
Ricoeur is finally overcoming the necessity of God. However, since guilt can only be arrived at
through the two preceding stages of defilement and sin, the question of God remains as a presence
within the concept of guilt. There will always be recourse to the prior symbolism (Ricoeur
1967: 152).
Finally, having traced a movement from defilement through sin to guilt or from the
external forces of evil to the subjective consciousness of its relation to the will Ricoeur sets out
the terms of the myths that underpin and establish all effective symbols which Simms latterly
distils into four key myths: the myth of the creation of the world or the most nave forms of

38
myth that aim to say something of the origins of the world, the evil or chaos that is its primordial
disorder, and that must be put right to return order to the world. This is followed by the myth of
the tragic vision of existence. Here the Greek model is paramount with the spectacle of a hero
blinded by the excess of ambition and punished by the gods. Ricoeur emphasises the theatrical
spectacle of the drama that is watched rather than the story that is recounted. The third myth is
that of the fall the Adamic myth that presents the anthropological relation. The myth of
origin, that of evil, is relocated within the human and becomes radical through being brought
into the world by the sinner. This last aspect introduces into the myth that which is absent from
the former two: the aspect of penitence. This is the retention of something that remains
absolutely forbidden. Humankind is free to decide but cannot be the absolute arbiter of that
freedom. Humanity is free but not autonomous. The fourth type of myth is that of the exiled
soul for which the myth of Orpheus stands supreme. This myth confers the recognition of
combination and separation of the body and the soul. It configures an eschatological force and a
movement towards death or the death of the body that retains the life, or continuation, of the
soul (Simms 2003: 24-26).
Concluding this process of accounting for myths, Ricoeur then reconsiders them in
respect of modernity. He acknowledges that in modernity we are living in a post-mythological
age that is speculative and sceptical of clearly defined foundations (Ricoeur 1967: 306).
Nevertheless, Ricoeur claims, myths and the symbols that contain their hidden intentions cannot
be easily abandoned or ignored. He doubts the possibility of being able simply to view all such
myths as pure and is indifferent to the probability of spectators rationally demythifying each in
turn. The resistance of each of the myths, by varying degrees, remains in their constant
allegorisation and reification in various cultural forms. Ricoeur proclaims the Adamic myth to be
the exemplar by virtue of its residual status within the structure of Christianity that retains a
dominant if doctrinally diminishing role in Western cultural life. Moreover, it not only
contains the other myths, it also calls upon interpretation and, as such, continues to give rise to
new appropriations and reinterpretations.
In a later essay, The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I, Ricoeur
sets about separating the symbols from the myths to a further degree. The symbol, claims
Ricoeur, does not posit a meaning; rather it gives rise to thought, something to think about
(Ricoeur 2004: 285). He breaks the symbols down into primary and mythical categories: the

39
symbol of evil is constituted by starting from something which has a first-level meaning and is
borrowed from the experience of nature of contact, of mans orientation in space (Ricoeur
2004: 287). This is the primary symbol. Mythical symbols are more articulated; they leave room
for the dimension of narrative, with its fabled characters, places, and times, and tell of the
Beginning and End of experience of which the primary symbols are the avowal (Ricoeur 2004:
287). It is here that Ricoeur most closely suggests the problem of symbols and myths that Jean-
Luc Nancy contests and, it is the claim here, that the films of Tarr, Seidl, Muratova, Andersson,
etc., equally problematise within the area of cinema. Ricoeur writes in this essay:

in distinction from technical signs, which are perfectly transparent and say only what they
mean by positing the signified, symbolic signs are opaque: the first, literal, patent
meaning analogically intends a second meaning which is not given otherwise than in the first.
This opaqueness is the symbols very profundity, an inexhaustible depth (Ricoeur 2004:
287).

In relation to the films outlined in the introduction to this thesis, it is apparent that they each
contain certain symbols that can be located within Ricoeurs schematic. In particular they can be
broken down by their location of the central categories of defilement, sin and guilt. Flanders, for
example, can be viewed from the point of view of the stain or defilement of war, both as a
spectre on the history of the films landscape and in the genealogy of war as the stain of human
conflict. In a certain way too, The Asthenic Syndrome, Palms and Russian Ark all suggest a relation to
defilement or stain as the condition of chaos and disintegration visited by the collapse of
communism. Each of these films expresses the primary symbolic constituents of obscurity,
blindness, waywardness, sickness and pollution. The Asthenic Syndrome and Palms, made in the late
1980s and early 1990s respectively, react more immediately and intuitively to the images of
contradiction and disintegration in evidence, without recourse to either the mythic structures of
disorder and order that narrative paradigms provide. Their immediacy does not provide them
with the retrospective privilege to single out causes or initiating factors. Russian Ark, made after
the immediate events, nevertheless, reconfigures the Soviet century (the wasted twentieth
century described in the narration) as a defilement of the order of culture.

40
Stntang, Songs from the Second Floor and Werckmeister Harmonies, however, are inclined
towards the primary symbols of sin. Both Stntang and Songs from the Second Floor present
tensions between social constructs and forms of idolatry. Stntang combines the figure of a false
messiah and the hopes and reassurances that the communal group misguidedly place in the
returning, and imaginatively resurrected, figure of Irimas who, the film also reveals, is driven
by vengeful motives. Songs from the Second Floor depicts a societys recourse to a variety of forms of
idolatry and ritual under the conditions of disintegration that occur, ranging from self-flagellation
and crystal-ball gazing to the sacrifice of a child. Werckmeister Harmonies retains several symbols,
carrying over the stain of pollution and destruction visited inexplicably by the arrival of the
circus that is also driven by the seemingly vengeful and mysterious figure of the Prince seen
only as the visual stain of a shadow thrown onto a wall. Furthermore, it opens up the structure
of the human and nonhuman through the mystery of the contagion of mob violence that sweeps
the town and the dark side of orders restitution by martial law. Each film presents the symbols of
a mysterious power that has been turned away from, and at the same time, refuses a fully
determined synthesis upon which order can be regained.
Ulrich Seidls Dog Days and Import Export, along with Roy Anderssons You the Living,
present more recognisable propositions of guilt within the suffering and actions of various
protagonists. Dog Days depicts the guilt and suffering of loss, violent abuse, and loneliness across a
wide-ranging group of characters. Import Export, focusing on two principle characters, retains the
guilt of a mother leaving her child to travel as an economic migrant and a young man, in debt,
who seeks to overcome the guilt of his physical and social emasculation. Both stories are further
framed within a structure that raises questions of the status of human lives in the midst of modern
economic determinism. You the Living frames its multiple vignettes within an overarching guilt at
the violence humanity is capable of bestowing upon itself. This ranges from the incidental
reference to Swedens wartime collaboration with the Nazis (a slight but resonant fixture in
Anderssons films from the short, World of Glory [1994], through Songs from the Second Floor to You
the Living) and the overarching dream of the aerial bombing of a city.
As suggested in the introduction, these examples are only some of the variety of symbols
that fluctuate throughout the films, each of them acting as something like Ricoeurs primary
symbols obscure, opaque, excessive, inexhaustible points of reference that are all crucially

41
refused the synthesis or paradigmatic reconciliation of fully developed myths or rational modes of
narrative or psychological interpretation. They are, so-to-speak, myths interrupted.
Jean-Luc Nancy uses the term myth interrupted in an essay of that title published in The
Inoperative Community (1986). There he sets out to explore myth and its foundational figures within
the structure of community and the political. The question of a being-in-common and a human
experience derived from the community of a shared finitude has driven much of Nancys work
that has evolved (since the late 1960s and early 1970s) from philosophical critique, through
politics and theology to aesthetics. A key theme in Nancys overall philosophical perspective is
that of fragmentation and an anti-foundationalism (see James 2006). In this mid-period essay,
Nancy presents an hiatus within the founding principles and effects of myth.
Similarly to Ricoeur, Nancy eschews the formula for myth (or mythology) that attends
to fables, epic sagas or heroic narratives and addresses myth as those symbols and traditions which
communities appeal to as a means to found shared existence or perpetuate existence as an intimate
sharing of an identity or essence. Myth is a language or discourse in which a community
recognises and shares principles, foundational and structuring relations and interpretations. Ian
James outlines this formula in terms of the character of sense that underwrites Nancys
philosophical project where sense is untied from an exclusive belonging to a symbolic order
or relation of signifier to signified; [existing] both as an outer limit and as an excess of signification
per se, becoming the element in which signification, interpretations and representations can occur
(James 2006: 9). As such, myth refers to the manner in which sense, as the shared stuff of finite
existence, is organized into a signifying discourse or narrative, a series of figures or fictions upon
which specific communal formations and practices are based (James 2006: 196).
Therefore, where Ricoeur sees symbol and myth as providing the grounds for ritual
actions and shared understanding, Nancy views them as the limit situations around which
alternating meanings, significations, or representations conflict with each other. As James notes,
Nancy argues that it is not possible to appeal to the existence of any shared concepts without
accounting for the mutual implications of the various myths that underpin it (James 2006: 197).
However, one should not be reduced to the other or vice versa: that is, it does not automatically
follow that myths are the cause of political or historical events or that historical or political events
can be reduced to a defining myth. Rather it implies that a fundamental articulation of sense
(existence) and the formalizing of that sense into the signifying discourses of myth (the

42
communication of an in-common) gives an overall context of sense and meaning which would
underpin historical causality (and agency) per se (James 2006: 197).
Where Ricoeur consigns existence to a mystery and thereafter attempts to recover the
meaning of moral, ethical and religious symbolism, Nancy attempts to approach the mystery of
existence head-on. Rather than seeing myth in the traditional sense of something like a timeless
founding principle for the human condition and the base of its shared identity, he insists, instead,
on a nonidentity that (recast from Heideggers Mitsein, or being-with), is not and has never
been something foundational. Through phases of history, and particularly through modernity, the
metaphysical claims of shared mythology have been lost, ruptured or dispersed. The community
of shared experience, then, is always ahead of us, as something that happens to us, as question,
waiting, event, imperative (Nancy 1991: 11). There has never been a totalising form of essence,
identity or sharing. Rupture and dispersal, or the separation of the various in-common entities
within community, are exposed at their limits or borders. Christopher Fynsk writes, in the
introduction to The Inoperative Community: Community is presuppositionless: this is why it is
haunted by such ambiguous ideas as foundation and sovereignty, which are at once ideas of what
would be completely suppositionless and ideas of what would always be presupposed. But
community cannot be presupposed. It is only exposed (in Nancy 1991: xxxix).
Nancy, then, rejects all traditional meanings ascribed to shared existence (or community)
to, instead, claim a community based on a lack of identity or totality: It is this lack that is
constitutive of community itself (Nancy 1991: 12) since community is not something
foundational that has been lost but something that happens to us, that is immanent and imminent
(Nancy 1991: 11). In this respect, Nancy claims community is not a concept that has been lost.
Rather, it is always evolving and shifting and, following Blanchot, is as much an unworking. It is
no longer a matter of production and completion but one of encounters with interruption,
fragmentation, suspension (Nancy 1991: 31). He writes:

Community is made of the interruption of singularities, or of the suspension that singular


beings are. Community is not the work of singular beings, nor can it claim them as its
work, just as communication is not a work or even an operation of singular beings, for
community is simply their being their being suspended upon its limit (Nancy 1991: 31).

43
It is such a formula for suspense in communication and community, its incompleteness and its
limits, that the films of Tarr, Andersson, Muratova, etc., enact as an aesthetic and narrative
process. They are marked by the persitent theme of waiting, of anticipation without completion,
that ties the events of the films content to the shared spectatorial experience.
Where Ricoeur appeals to myth to recover the foundations of a shared community and an
identity based on particular understanding, Nancy finds the failures of community and identity, by
contrast, to interrupt the total realisation of myths within history. As James remarks, the
insufficiency of myths and founding narratives to properly account for existence in all its
refractory, ungraspable, singular plurality is what reveals the finitude of human community
(James 2006: 198). For Nancy, shared finitude forms the perpetual unravelling of community in
the constant existential-temporal movement towards death of each and every one of us; it is the
movement of history. James adds, The interruption of myth in this context would be its exposure
to the plurality of finite sense for which it cannot account, and thus its exposure to new forms of
sense or meaning. (James 2006: 199). As such, dialectical or teleological processes are essentially
flawed since they must perpetually and persistently succumb to interruption from the excess or
suspension of sense.
Contrary to Ricoeurs attempts to bind meaning and its recovery to the development of
symbols via an hermeneutics that takes the world to be textual and the interpretation of its
underlying symbols to hold the key to its mysteries, Nancy asserts the interruption of symbols as
the focus of attention. Crucially however, Nancy does not go on to proclaim the irrelevance or
obsolescence of symbols (in the search for an abstract or axiomatic formula for meaning, as does,
for example, Alain Badiou). Rather, Nancy attempts to locate a formula for sense or a non-
foundational ontology of existence not located in a subject in the collision or limit situation
of the dominant structures of meaning and the contingent, plural and irreducible excesses of
historical events. Therefore, aesthetics plays a crucial part in the exposure of sense. Ian James
writes:

In [Nancys] thinking of unworked community there is no experience of mythic


foundation without experience itself, as shared finitude, countering or interrupting myth.
For Nancy, the key issue of praxis within this context relates to the means by which the
interruption of myth and with this the experience of finite being-in-common can be

44
affirmed. In La Communaut dsoeuvre this experience of interruption finds its most
important affirmation in the practice of writing called literature (James 2006: 199).

In subsequent publications, what Nancy says of literature has been extended to account more
widely for aesthetics and the artwork a generality including the cinema. This elevation of
literature to a principle place in the configuration of community and politics and, by
extension, sense is consistent with Nancys view of the artwork as affirming a sharing of sense
which is irreducible to any fixed identity or meaning (James 2006: 200). Most significantly for
Nancy, the idea of literature enables what he terms a literary communism or an articulation of
shared being beyond any figure of identity; an opening onto sense where it has the quality of
being, its nature and its structure are sharing (Nancy 1991: 64). For Nancy, the literature that
achieves this disclosure, or opening (as opposed to those forms of literature that reiterate and
reinforce traditions) points to a specific manner of being-in-the-world that is nothing but
communication itself, the passage from one to another, the sharing of one by the other (Nancy
1991: 65). It is this notion of being-in-the-world and addressing the world through the artwork
that returns most strongly in Nancys reflections on the cinema as a way of looking, a regard for
the world and its truth (Nancy 2001: 13-14).
In summary then, this chapter claims that the films outlined in this thesis each present
various versions of the symbols and myths that can be associated with defilement, sin and guilt
the three core elements in Paul Ricoeurs configuration of the human condition as one of fallibility
and contradiction. However, these films proceed to interrupt these symbols, preventing them
from fully achieving their synthesis in traditional terms. What is revealed through these films is the
excess and suspension of traditional or recoverable meanings, that is, a human experience of
shared recognition without recourse to particular values or identities. Following Jean-Luc Nancy,
this aesthetic formula reflects experience, or sense, through the relation of recognisable symbols
cut adrift from the foundational or transcendent structures that give them particular meanings.
Central to the cinematic terms of this formula enacted by the post-historical films under
discussion it is the overriding action of suspense that opens such a space of exposure. From the
waiting for a new language and the birth of the narrators son in Palms to the suspension of the
cut in Russian Ark; from the waiting for the false messiahs or the coming catastrophes in
Stntang, Songs from the Second Floor and Werckmeister Harmonies, to the suspension of judgement

45
(which is also suspense in the cinematic sense of awaiting narrative conclusion) in Elephant, Last
Days, Dog Days or Import Export, these films pose the problem of identifying a meaning in the
traditional sense of a confirmed identification or a revealed signification. Instead they offer up
their images to speculation and a tension as we wait for a revelation they does not arrive; the
condition that Nancy describes as sense, as that which is suspended over this sense that has already
touched us (Nancy 1997: 11, original in italics). Therefore, there is no mystery (as something to be
revealed) only a sense derived from ever modifying experience:

The experience in question is not a mystical experience. Rather, no doubt it is the


experience of this, that there is no experience of sense if experience is supposed to
imply the appropriation of a signification but that there is nothing other than experience
of sense (and this is the world) if experience says that sense precedes all appropriation or
succeeds on and exceeds it (Nancy 1997: 11).

Likewise, implying no mystery, only a sense, these films distinguish themselves from the
symbolic formulae of Ricoeur. Guilt is a form of suspense and confession is its release, however,
these films precisely play on this relation to present a contradiction that is the limit of both
confessions evidence and its withdrawal. They express the guilt in suspense whilst refusing either
the atonement or judgement of confession, opening onto a shared experience between film and
spectator of an evidence or exposure of sense.
In the next chapter I aim to elaborate Nancys assertion of an ethos or habitus in
relation to this sense which is also a relation to the world. Nancy develops this relation from
the consequence of the exhaustion of metaphysics attributed to the post-historical era. At the same
time, then, this serves to emphasise the historical conditions in which these films emerged and
therefore, presents a provocative parallel between this periods conceptual formula and the films
corresponding aesthetic relevance.

46
CHAPTER 2

The Post-Historical Context: Redemptions Hiatus

The previous chapter identified a series of symbols and myths developed by Paul Ricoeur that sets
out a framework for an understanding of defilement, sin and guilt that underpin the condition of
human fallibility; a series of symbols with developed myths that can be readily identified as
elements within the post-historical films of Muratova, Tarr, etc. However, Ricoeurs attempt to
recover meaning, derived from the development of symbols, as it remains within an essentially
Christian perspective (why is there evil in the world?), was challenged by Jean-Luc Nancys more
recent formulation of the interruption of myth. Rather than attempting to evaluate according to
tradition the moral and ethical terms of the mystery of evil the signs of its immoral tendencies
and violent, antagonistic effects as does Ricoeur, Nancy argues that the very limit situation of
symbols, myths and meanings, their perpetual incompleteness, opens up a space for the
recognition of experience, or sense. This, in itself, presents a reorientation of aesthetic practice
away from the mythologising of meaning in traditional imagery and narrative and the deliberate
de-mythologising of meaning in modernist art and its anti-narrative and self-reflexive strategies, to
a presentation of the sense of experience as it simultaneously reveals and withdraws meaning or
signification a process that Nancy calls transimmanence (Nancy 1997: 55).
At the heart of Nancys approach is the re-configuration of ontology as a movement of
shared finitude that is not beholden to any particular foundation, identity or sovereignty.
Ontology emerges from the constant movement of sense as it is exposed at the limits of
signification and, therefore, presents not so much the creation of new meanings as the space in
which new meanings can occur. As Douglas Morrey notes, Nancy repeatedly plays on the double
meaning, in French, of sense (le sens) as both perceptual senses and their objects and meaning
and signification (Morrey 2008: 10). This double meaning is crucial to the artwork, which is then
repositioned not as a representation of particular meanings new or reified, but as fragments of the
world (of sense) presented back to the world. It is, then, the presentation of the negative,
contradictory, antagonistic, and violent aspects of sense that forms the overarching characteristic
of the post-historical films set out in this thesis, as here we recall Nancys claim that it is in our

47
distress that we know our coexistence (in Lingis 1997:197). There remains the question of this
post-historical context and its relevance to the films. This question brings to light the relation
between their aesthetic and conceptual strategies and those of contemporary theory at large. It
also draws attention to the parallels between cinematic practice and cultural theory operating
within, and in response to, the same kinds of social, political and historical conditions.
For Nancy, the formula for shared finitude reconfigures the concept of community as
the locus of meanings and their constant interruption and reinvention. Community describes a
being-in-common which is fluid and multiple: there are many communities overlapping, sharing
and conflicting with each other, whilst a community (or communion) through artworks can open
the possibility of shared experience that is not dependent on a foundation or identity. Artworks
function as the medium through which traditions are disrupted deliberately or otherwise. In The
Inoperative Community Nancy writes:

Community necessarily takes place in what Blanchot has called unworking, referring to
that which, before or beyond work, withdraws from the work, and which, no longer
having to do either with production or with completion, encounters interruption,
fragmentation, suspension (Nancy 1991: 31).

Artworks function as fragments of the world and as openings and exposures of sense through their
capacity to present an experience that can be shared. Nancy develops this notion of community in
direct response to the historical conditions of a post-Heideggarian exhaustion of metaphysics and
as a response to Jean-Paul Sartres contention that communism was the unsurpassable horizon of
our time (in Nancy 1991: 1) it is an address specifically aimed at the legacy of Marxism,
communism and the demand for a narrative of collective or mass emancipation at the heart of
modernity. Nancys ontological emphasis that leads to an aesthetic address directly
anticipates and responds to the conditions of post-history that are identified with the end of
foundational and teleological schemes for progress (not only by Fukuyama but also thinkers such
as Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard). At the same time, it corresponds to the expansion
of liberal capitalism, and the distillation of a social body that is atomised through the economic and
technological functions of capitalism, leading to the dominant metaphysics of the individual
subject. Nancy deliberately seeks to move the focus away from nostalgic contemplation of a lost

48
horizon of communism to question the configuration of communism or community as a model.
Community (which includes artworks) comprises of an always already present experience of
singular-plurality. This configuration of the specific and the relational then determines his
ontology of sense. This is not a theory of concepts reducible to an axiomatic judgement but
rather, as Ian James puts it, an ethos and a praxis that demands attention to [] the being of
entities and events as well as an openness to the inexhaustibility and open-endedness of meaning
and signification (James 2006: 112). Thus avoiding any foundational structure or regulating
principle for community (or communism as community), it emphasises the more immediate sense
of communion as receiving: an opening of the self to what is beyond sense and into its
unworking (Nancy 2008c: 9) a thread Nancy has continued when exploring the legacy of the
parable, a point to be revisited later.
In a recent work, The Creation of the World or Globalisation, Nancy returns to this lost
horizon of community, filtering it through the English/French distinction between the terms
globalisation and mondialisation. The first, particular to the English language and with its
undercurrent of what Heidegger would call productionist metaphysics the materialistic basis of
Western life and thought (in Clark 2002: 29) implies a mastery of the world without remainder;
the formulation of a system of techno-economic control that is totalising. The second, uniquely
French term, is interpreted as world-forming, retaining horizons as interruptions and
suspensions of sense (Nancy 2007: 36). In this etymology, globalisation is replete with the
metaphysical and eschatological formula of its Western, Christian orientation (Nancy 2007: 33-
37). Such an orientation more widely develops what Nancy set out in an essay The
Deconstruction of Christianity (in Nancy 2008b) in which he adopts and expands links between a
Christian world-view as an integral part of capitalism initiated by Max Weber (Weber 2004) and
developed by Marcel Gauchet (Gauchet 1997). For Nancy, mondialisation proposes a thinking of
community that retains the horizons and thresholds of the persistent and shared struggle for justice
within itself. Therefore it stands in opposition to the economical and technological uniformity of a
perceived globalisation that subjects the community of justice to the preconceived terms of its
dominant ideology.
Ian James has pointed out that in The Creation of the World, Nancy reinforces his position
from which ontology and the ethics of decision are co-existent and co-originary and the very terms
of creation are relieved of any foundationalist or determining factors key symbols or founding

49
myths and the constant movement of creation is stressed. This reiterates the engagement with
community and being-in-common, or being-in-the-world, that revokes the theological or
transcendent overtones of creation to envisage a materialist form of sense that expresses the
contingency of creation evolving and passing through historical situations (James 2006: 234).
Once again, symbols and myths are not dispensed with but reoriented as the horizons or limit
situations of beginnings and ends. This places the Western, Christian paradigm and its
eschatological and redemptive impetus at the centre of both metaphysics and representation and
emphasises its mythology as the problem of beginnings and ends, which in turn serves to reveal
sense.
The conception of redemption is reiterated in countless ways within teleological
frameworks of secular politics, not least in their placing of community the masses or the
people, their emancipation or their ordering as central to form. They constantly derive
foundations and seek totalising goals. Such formulae remain consistent in the narratives of order
and disorder, catastrophe and survival, crime and justice, suffering and redemption throughout
the history of cinema. Within this history the cinema has been elaborated upon in relation to the
concept of the masses: as a vehicle for mass communication and a community of images and
myths, of mass consumption and mass spectacle. From the classical Hollywood appeal to family,
class, property and a Christian world-view identified by Bordwell et al. (Bordwell 1985), to the
revolutionary rhetoric of Soviet montage or 1960s modernism, mass audiences have been the
target of both conservative and emancipatory narratives and movements within film theory
attentive to audience reception.
What can be drawn from Nancys perspective is a thinking of the cinema that is less a
medium of myths and collective images, signs and meanings, or shared beliefs through
established traditions, than it is acts of disclosure responding to the world as present and singular.
It calls upon something like an act of faith, which is a matter of hearing: of hearing our own ear
listening, of seeing our own eye looking, even at that which opens it and at that which is eclipsed
in this opening (Nancy 2008c: 10). Where philosophy after Heidegger is conditioned by a
confrontation with is own termination, no longer grounded on any teleology or fundamental
schema, so it becomes, as Christopher Fynsk identifies, a matter of repeating the movements by
which philosophy exhausted its possibilities, where this is a task of repetition that cannot be
completed (in Nancy 1991: vii, original in italics). Films like The Asthenic Syndrome, Stntang or

50
Songs from the Second Floor do not resort to a modernist formula of abstraction or meaninglessness,
something like a negative dialectic of aesthetics put forward by Adorno (Lechte 1994, 179) and
realised most cinematically in the mediums early modern phase of the 1920s as Jacques Rancire
has observed (Rancire 2006). These films, rather, maintain cinemas predominantly realist and
mythic orientations, but seek to resist, contest and disrupt those myths by suspending the
predetermination of their symbols. They do not conclude that the era of their production is absurd
or meaningless. Rather, they seek to open a space for insistence on the insufficiency of traditional
signs, motifs, symbols and their narratives in the face of an hiatus in the ideological terms of
beginning and end. In short, in the sense that Nancy seeks to delineate the philosophical
implications of the exhaustion of metaphysics, we might suggest such films, likewise, delineate the
exhaustion of the symbolic and mythic structures of narrative cinema.
This perspective points towards the post-historical in a particular way. From the
collapse of foundational and teleological discourses and the dissolution of modernity into
postmodernity, the evental aspect of history comes to the fore. With it comes realignment away
from conceptual programmes, generic paradigms and dramatic archetypes and towards the
provenance of an inital experience. In this sense, the films of Muratova, Tarr, Seidl, Van Sant,
etc., are conditioned by their immediate historical relation (the collapse of the Communist State,
the influx of cross border migration, or the occurrence of a specific high school shooting) and yet,
they do not specify these events, elevate them to paradigmatic significance, or attempt to account
for them through historical or generic narrative. Instead, they turn on the intimate conditions of a
given moment, a time or place, and the limits and aporetics of human actions and responsibilities.
In short, from the immediacy of the traumatic conditions or events to which they respond, they
refuse any attempt at mastery. Rather, they initiate or recreate their responses from the
perspective of an historical hiatus. Films such as Russian Ark and Flanders that directly challenge an
historical legacy ultimately arrest forward motion within suspension and repetition respectively.
What is central to this post-historical context, then, is less an apparent descent into nihilism or
the loss of meanings attached to clearly defined political, ideological or narrative structures than
the status of the artwork, the film, in the midst of this hiatus.
Doubtless the collapse of the political programme of Soviet Communism in 1989
provoked the declaration of many conceptual and ideological ends to the twentieth century (Sim
1999). The persistence of apocalyptic scenarios, from the millennium bug to environmental

51
catastrophe, and the rise of nationalism, religious fundamentalism and the heightened state of
emergency declared by Western governments in the wake of the events of 11 th September 2001,
have forced an agenda of pervasive crisis and an acute anxiety, dread and foreboding towards
violence and catastrophe on a spectacular scale within the past two decades. The Hollywood
studios have responded with a reinvigoration of the spectacular via the resurgence of B Movie
narrative conservatism and state-of-the-art special effects, from the natural disaster of The Day
After Tomorrow (2004) to the rampaging monster of Cloverfield (2007). Meanwhile, the subject of
domestic threat and sadistic violence, from the commercial trend for home-invasion played as
horror, and the sub-genre of torture porn (see Newman 2006), through to Michael Hanekes
riposte with Funny Games (1998), we are reminded of Walter Benjamins famous dictum that
human beings can experience their own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure (Benjamin 1999:
235). This restitution of archetypes, not least in the parodic form so characteristic of post-
modernity, has led Alain Badiou, for one, to proclaim the present cinema to be dominated by a
neo-classicism (Badiou 2005: 93).
However, the disintegration, decay and violence that permeate the films argued for here
display a marked resistance to the cinematically spectacular destruction configured within
traditional redemptive structures. As noted in the introduction, their collective propensity
towards delineating an ontology of violence or decay is what marks them out. Moreover, their
particular reference to themes of apocalypse, religious idolatry, Christology and resurrection
necessarily calls into question, and even evokes the failure, of religious or theological systems of
belief and their attendant moral structures. The transcendent basis for such moral valuation is seen
to lose its meaning. This loss of meaning poses the question of nihilism in contemporary society.
Simon Critchley identifies nihilism as Nihilism is this declaration of meaninglessness, a sense of
indifference, directionlessness or, at its worst, despair that can flood into all areas of life
(Critchley 2007: 2).
Critchleys summary would seem readily applicable to the outlined films and to their host
of characters apparently without direction, struggling against the circumstances into which they
are thrown and acting, willed or unwilled, in antagonistic, violent or self-destructive ways. In
reviews, Songs from the Second Floor is summarised as a lugubrious danse macabre stifling hope at
every step, [appearing] to drown in its own misery (Bracewell 2000: 37); Dog Days as adhering
dogmatically to the school of sado-miserabilism (Lim 2003); Elephant, in providing no insight or

52
enlightenment appears pointless at best and irresponsible at worst (McCarthy 2003); military
conflict in Flanders is described as lacking any specific mission or leader, [soldiers] fan out into the
desert with blank, meaningless glares to commit a series of bungles and war crimes (Lee 2007);
Stntang is said to achieve a transporting nihilism that casts a heavy spell; this seven-hour
contemplation of boredom, decay and misery (Maslin 1994); and The Asthenic Syndrome describes
a world in which cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost;
all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless (Roberts 1999: 147).
Such reviews equally hint at the other, secular, side of nihilism what Critchley calls, this
time, a political disappointment: the realization that we inhabit a violently unjust world
(Critchley 2007: 3). This situation provokes the need for an ethics or some normative grounds for
confronting that world. The present era the post-modern has often been characterised as
replacing ethics with aesthetics. Meaninglessness allows for a chic aesthetic radicalism that
disguises a moral or political vacuum. Boggs and Pollard argue that:

What postmodern films share in common is an irreverence for authority and convention
a rebellious spirit, dystopic views of the future, cynical attitudes toward the family and
romance, images of alienated sexuality, narrative structures deprecating the role of old-
fashioned heroes, and perhaps above all, the sense of a world filled with chaos. These
features are often combined with a romantic turn toward nostalgia, a longing for the past
that encapsulates so much postmodern culture, along with a harshly critical, even nihilistic
attitude toward politics. (Boggs 2003: ix)

The relative simplicity with which nihilism is attached to chaos, despair and destructive impetus
invites the need to distinguish the films of Muratova, Tarr, etc., from the binary terms of
meaning/meaninglessness that are locked into established modes of narrative and representation.
It is from an outline of the terms of nihilism, and the means by which theorists such as Jacques
Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy (following Heideggers response to Nietzsche and nihilism), that a
more subtle account of these films can begin. In side-stepping the duality of meaning and
meaninglessness aligned with traditional discourses to instead present the filmed image as a
threshold of sense and a contact with experience they point towards a means of resistance to

53
nihilism, allied with what Critchley calls the philosophical task set by Nietzsche (Critchley 2007:
2).
Nietzsches famous assertion of the death of God at the end of the nineteenth century
contributed a profound scepticism, not only to the theological truths of the Judeo-Christian
tradition challenged at least since the Enlightenment, but also to the great idealist projects that had
attempted to replace it. This scepticism developed from an historical relativism: if history
demonstrates that there are and have been wildly differing accounts of the meaning of events and
the essence of human existence then there can only ever be interpretations of the world. Nietzsche
called this condition perspectivism:

In so far as the word knowledge has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is
interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it but countless meanings
Perspectivism. (Nietzsche 1968: 267)

There can be no objective valuation of the world, no single perspective that is true, not for
rational, idealist, positivist or scientific thought any more than for religious dogma. It is the
realisation of the impossibility of any truth essentially those moral or ideological configurations
of the world designed to grant humans value or redeem suffering that creates an overpowering
sense of meaninglessness.

The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of
existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of aim, the concept of unity,
or the concept of truth. Existence has no end or goal; any comprehensive unity in the
plurality of events is lacking: the character of existence is not true, is false (Nietzsche
1968: 13).

The Christian perspective then becomes central to this critique since, in Nietzsches diagnosis,
nihilism is rooted in its particular interpretation of the world: that is, the belief in a true world of
divine grace in opposition to the false world of earthly becoming. As Simon Critchley notes in an
earlier study, nihilism is not simply the negation of the Christian-Moral interpretation of the
world, but is the consequence of that interpretation; that is to say, it is the consequence of moral

54
valuation (Critchley 1997: 8). The death of God reveals religious truths to be nothing but
psychological balms; therefore, the will for moral interpretation is shown to be nothing but the
will to an untruth.

As soon as man finds out how that [true] world is fabricated solely from psychological
needs, and how he has absolutely no right to it, the last form of nihilism comes into being:
it includes disbelief in any metaphysical world and forbids itself any belief in a true world.
Having reached this standpoint, one grants the reality of becoming as the only reality,
forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities but
cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it. (Nietzsche 1968: 13, original
italics)

How to endure the world, without denying it or deluding ourselves with ever more elaborate
forms of meaning was the legacy of Nietzsches argument, what Critchley calls the philosophical
task of how to resist nihilism (Critchley 2007: 2). Nietzsche had warned of two particular
attitudes to nihilism, those he called active and passive.
According to Critchley, active nihilism, recognising the world to be meaningless, is
characterised by the desire to destroy the present world and bring another into being: a resonant
rhetoric for a range of utopian, politically radical and terrorist groups throughout history
(Critchley 2007: 5). It desires an overturning of everyday life. Such an overturning might also be
said to be the overburdened task ascribed to montage within a history of cinematic practice and
theory, an underlying theme in the following chapter.
Passive nihilism, which also recognises the world as meaningless, reacts through a
withdrawal from any belief in progress or the perfectibility of human nature and the desire to
transform conditions. Instead, it is inclined to refuse to face the brutality of reality and seeks a
mystical stillness for the self (Critchley 2007: 5). Nietzsche likened it to Buddhism (Nietzsche
1968: 18). The formal inclination within the films to adopt a contemplative, even transcendental
style (as defined by Paul Schrader, the subject of Chapter Four), without recourse to a
prescriptive mode of response to the conditions described, may open them to the charge of a
passive nihilism. However, their forthright confrontation with the conditions of violence,
antagonism and decay is far from a refusal of the reality of a brutal world. Ultimately, then, it

55
will be the configuration of the terms of the real as sense that becomes the crux of their
relation with redemption after Nancy.
All of the films demonstrate a recognisably realist world whose spatial and temporal
relations are fully intact. There is a meaningful relation between people and objects, landscapes
and architectures, events and their effects. What appears to fail to provide meaning are those
assumptions based on a binary opposition of meaning and meaninglessness associated with an
expectation of the articulation of traditional editing logic: of cause and effect or of psychological
identification. The question of death and being towards death, hovers over the films and yet, amid
the violence and catastrophe, there is an absence of death either as a withdrawal from life or as a
revolutionary attempt at overhaul conditions. Certainly death presented as a romanticised form of
closure, as it is so often fetishised in many post-war modernist films of the New Waves in
certain films by Jean-Luc Godard or Wim Wenders, for instance (see Russell, 1995) is clearly
suspended. Indeed, sickness and invalidity remains a more prominent thread than death
throughout, as with the titular pathology of The Asthenic Syndrome, the institutionalisation of Kalles
son in Songs from the Second Floor, the decline of Valushka in Werckmeister Harmonies, the hysteria of
Barbe in Flanders, for example. Such conditions speak less of a definable meaninglessness than a
condition of sickness or wretchedness that demands a cure. The effects of such symptoms in the
midst of failing social systems suggest the urgency of a critique of those very systems. Theodor
Adornos defence of Samuel Beckett against the charge of nihilism offers provocative implications.
Becketts plays in their aesthetic autonomy and their refusal of meaning (hence the superficial
accusation of nihilism) function as determinate negations of contemporary society (in Critchley
1997, 22).
In an earlier discussion of nihilism, Simon Critchley outlines a proposition developed
from both Heidegger and Adorno and reminiscent of Nancy in which he calls for a delineation of
the limits of nihilism. Against the founding of nihilism as a new ground that of meaninglessness
or nothingness he stresses a threshold across which the terms of experience operate and conflict
but still remain.

What will be at stake is a liminal experience, a deconstructive experience of the limit


deconstruction as an experience of the limit that separates the inside from the outside of
nihilism and which forbids us both the gesture of transgression and restoration. On such a

56
view, neither philosophy, nor art, nor politics alone can be relied upon to redeem the
world, but the task of thinking consists in a historical confrontation with nihilism that
does not give up on the demand that things might be otherwise (Critchley 1997: 12).

Heidegger had transformed Nietzsches concept of nihilism into the history of Being: one that led
to its oblivion. He understood Nietzches proposition that God is dead as the acknowledgement
that the supersensory no longer has any effective power, that is, God, standing for the
metaphysical realm of ideas and ideals (Platos true world), can be demonstrably nothing more
than a product of the sensory world a fable. Nietzsches attempt to overturn this Platonism
was inevitably entangled in its opposition and therefore remained, itself, metaphysics. As a result,
the essence of nihilism, in Heideggers diagnosis, lay in history, in the manner in which Being has
fallen into nothing (Critchley 1997: 15).
In response, Heidegger sought to move away from any attempt to cross the line
separating nihilism from its overcoming and, instead, to delineate it: to arrive at [a] thinking of
the essence of nihilism [that] will lead us into the thinking of Being as that unthought ground of all
metaphysical thinking (Critchley 1997: 15). Where the wilful attempt to overcome nihilism leads
to a forgetting of Being, the delineation would attempt to question the metaphysical language of
nihilism. Heidegger acknowledged the paradox of language the language he must use that it
remained caught in propositional terms that result in the application of the striking through of
those terms: the mediation of crossing out that Jacques Derrida later develops as the sous rature and
the trace (Critchley 1997: 17). Critchley concludes that Heideggers delineation offers a
deconstructive experience, quoting Heideggers own, cryptic expression: Thinking and
poeticizing must in a certain way go back to where they have always already been and at the same
time have still never built (in Critchley 1997: 17). Jacques Derrida described the trace as
testifying to a transcendental signified that is effaced while remaining legible (in Critchley 1997:
17). Similarly, it is in this sense that, for example, Bruno Dumonts Flanders makes the legacy of
conflict both present and absent in the landscape (Chapter Six) and Bla Tarrs Werckmeister
Harmonies challenges the traditional metaphysical overcoming of the animal within the human
(Chapter Nine).
Following from Heidegger, Critchley turns to Adorno and the closing passages of Minima
Moralia, in which the latter poses the question of the possibility of redemption in a world that has

57
proved itself so desperately in need of hope. The problem remains how to find a hope that is
neither some Promethean overturning nor a reification of already failed tradition. The relationship
between nihilism and redemption stems from the attempts to overcome nihilism. In that respect,
he argues that the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters (in
Critchley 1997: 19). What is important is the persistence of the demand. This is what Critchley
calls Adornos austere messianism (Critchley 1997: 24). The demand is doubly important from
the point of view of its impossibility more than its possibility. If a standpoint of salvation were
possible it would have to be refused precisely because it could only present a false image of
reconciliation. Acts of restitution only proclaim the restoration of the Christian-Moral
construction of the world; acts of overcoming (the premise of the active nihilist) only produce
new values that are corruptible by the kind of new orders that ultimately lead to fascism. In
Adornos account, the world has already shown itself to be indigent and distorted. As such, to
offer a picture of a reconciled world and peaceful world at this point in history would be to offer
something that can simply be recuperated by the culture industry and reproduced as ideology
(Critchley 1997: 23). In deliberately denying and resisting the traditional structure and relation of
redemption to event the possibility of hope remains in the presentation of experience and the
refusal to allow it to be qualified. Critchley concludes:

[] the demand that we view the world from the standpoint of how things might be
otherwise, is not a question of an berwinding [overcoming] of nihilism but of getting
consciousness to wrest or extricate (entwinden) from nihilism what is lost sight of in the
desire for overcoming (Critchley 1997:24).

This, he says, is Adornos austere messianism (Critchley 1997: 24), a term that immediately
points towards Jacques Derridas re-negotiation of the messianic in his most explicit response to
the end of European communism and the post-historical debate, Specters of Marx.
If Adornos messianism was drawn from the refusal to allow the strategies of
overcoming to dominate the conditions of suffering, need or oppression, Derridas messianism
aims to articulate the form in which suffering, need and oppression makes itself present at the
same time as it is rendered absent by the totalising forces of dominant culture. The messianic
defines the vigilance and readiness for action stripped of the programmatic prophecy of the term:

58
it is a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a
structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism
(Derrida 2006: 74). It is, in effect, the form of imminence, not its narrative. The messianic retains
a diagnosis of a heightened present that cannot be said to have exorcised its ghosts, or laid to rest
its past. In this way, the messianic is a sense or affect within the broader compression of history
(events) and ontology (Being). To express this diagnosis Derrida creates the term hauntology.
Derrida chooses the moment when the legacy of Marx had been declared dead to re-
awaken its ghost or spirit and to contemplate the form in which certain concepts and events
can remain both absent and present, visible yet indefinite. The spectre of Marx returns to
reiterate Derridas recurring theme of the trace, the assertion that all Western philosophy is based
on the premise that what is most apparent to our conscious understanding, what is most
immediate and obvious, hides an array of alternatives that are masked by discourse. However, the
spectre also provides a more imagistic and visionary formula for this concept, a showing that
expresses a more disturbing, more restless calling. It harks back to the evental as much, if not
more, than the conceptual. It is no longer the doctrine of Marxism that lingers so much as the
fragmentary instances of its motivation: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and
thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity
(Derrida 2006: 106).
In a further twist, Derrida asserts the potential for a redemptive force behind the spectre:

The specter is not only the carnal apparition of the spirit, its phenomenal body, its fallen
and guilty body, it is also the impatient and nostalgic waiting for a redemption, namely,
once again, for a spirit []. The ghost would be the deferred spirit, the promise or
calculation of an expiation (Derrida 2006: 170).

Early on Derrida seeks to establish the distinction between spectre and spirit: the former giving
phenomenality to the latter, and the latter only producing effect through material form
voice/language, image/signs (Derrida 2006: 5). Therefore the spirit exists prior to its first
apparition, detached from his material or historical forms but its redemptive aspect not
exhausted by them. The spectral, on the other hand, is a furtive and ungraspable visibility of the
invisible; distinct from the icon, idol or simulacrum because it does not simply appear before

59
us but we feel ourselves being looked at by it (Derrida 2006: 6). It is not merely an accounting
of past factual events, unresolved historical legacies, but an aestheticised, sensory re-presentation.
Within this re-presentation, through the artwork the film the historical takes on a confessional
tone that of its suspense and the insistence on expiation.
We may begin to see this aesthetic equivalent in the visible but conceptually or narratively
illusive synthesis of images on the cinema screen. Elephant carries within it the unequivocal ghost
of the Columbine High School shooting; Last Days, the ghost of Kurt Cobain. Russian Ark presents
the double haunting, or palimpsest, of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary history of Russia.
Flanders carries the spectre of the trenches of World War One within the frosty landscapes of
northern France. Roy Anderssons films, from World of Glory to You the Living, each carry the ghost
of Swedens wartime history within their mise-en-scne. Derridas hauntology the
incomprehensible within the comprehensible remains as the spectre of symbols and myths in an
aesthetic strategy in parallel with Derridas own characterisation of a legacy of concepts within the
terms of experience: a hauntology in place of an ontology.
Derrida is resistant to his formula being seen as any kind of aesthetics (Derrida 1999:
248). However, Fredric Jameson entertains the possibility, seeing an aesthetic as an historical
formproblem (Jameson 1999: 34): one that resists the proposition of any new kind of
philosophical system to instead operate at the limit point of procedures and the forming of
concepts. Contrary to the insistence on a new or transformative proposition or the forming of a
concept, the spectre interrupts the forming itself (Jameson 1999: 32). However, Jameson stresses
the point that the conditions of hauntology and its ghosts should not be thought of in the same
sense as those fully formed manifestations of literary ghosts or the haunting figures of fantasy or
fiction from the apparitions stalking the works of Shakespeare to their gothic counterparts, right
up to the possessive demons of modern cinema. Those are vengeful ghosts, visible ghosts searching
or demanding redemption or to be laid to rest. Those are the ghosts of ressentiment, of the dead
that demand something from the living or the dead that show the living that they have not yet
lived or fulfilled their lives (Jameson 1999, 40). Instead,

Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe
even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the
living present: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely

60
as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and
solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us (Jameson 1999: 39).

Similarly, we should recognise that the recurrent image of Swedens Nazi collaboration in Roy
Anderssons films; the suicide or the murdered in Gus Van Sants films; the beggars and
dispossessed on the streets of Kishinev in Aristakisyans Palms, make no attempt to conform to the
didactic or narrative modes of reconciliation administered by the cinema. The cinema cannot
redeem them in that sense, cannot settle scores or fulfil incomplete or unrecognised lives. Instead,
they intervene in the present of the viewing experience, destabilising it, forcing the self-
containment of dramatic narrative open with the presence of the restless forces of the real. Pier
Paolo Pasolini, writing in the late 1960s (a point to be returned to in Chapter Five), described an
image in the historic present as conferring a meaning, not so much predetermined, but
configured on the basis of its duration having passed and as such, shows us the evidence of
something a landscape, a violent act. Cinema, operating after the fact, watched or re-watched
after the fact, maintains this historic present as a ghost, as Derrida puts it, a non-contemporaneity
with itself of the living present (Derrida 2006, xviii, original in italics).
So despite Derridas own ambivalence towards aesthetics, the cinema can potentially be
reconfigured as an equivalent to the disturbing quality of the spectre that interrupts the smooth
running of the present. It offers the retention of the ability to disturb, cut loose from the effective
means of codifying or commodifying all transgressions, outrages or necessary demands for another
kind of sense. As Jameson suggests, a theoretical movement, or passage between past, present and
future meanings, simultaneously withdrawn, can be located in an aesthetic equivalence that is
antifoundational yet irreducible, exposed in an event that continues to haunt via its remaining
incomplete and uninterpreted.
It is in this sense that the idea of redemption its demand remains within the films set
out in this thesis. Through their deliberate presentation and disruption of the symbols of
redemption they retain its presence at the same time as they visibly reinforce its absence. They
open a space between the symbols of redemption and its translation or recovery into myth,
narrative or image. But, equally, they do not consign it to history or to a proof of failure. In the
later chapters (five to eleven) the question of the ghostly demand for redemption will be derived
from the specific films as it occurs in the haunted landscape and destiny of war, in Flanders for

61
example; or how it maintains itself amid the ghostly echoes of history that resonate through The
Asthenic Syndrome, Palms or Russian Ark even as the vision of the future is repeatedly obscured.
Obscurity and vision will propel Jean-Luc Nancys reworking of this Derridean theme as he
develops it towards a more clearly applicable aesthetic effect, itself derived from his overall
formula for sense, and for which the poetic (and cinematic) impacts equally with philosophy on
rendering experience. This is not to suggest that this is a satisfactory formula for a future
philosophy or politics, only that it offers a means to reflect on the films produced in parallel with
such theories that does not reduce them to a nihilism.
Certainly, Alain Badiou, for one, has sought to distance himself from Derridas project. In
contradiction to a deconstructive approach to the teleology of Western metaphysics, one that
seeks to locate and emphasise the various absences in the formula of presence, deferring explicit
meanings to highlight the inconsistencies and the insubstantialities on which such an overarching
metaphysics has been founded, Badiou has sought to locate an axiomatics of thought in the
identification and recognition of key events. He challenges deconstruction by demanding a
break with historicism itself to realign thinking away from the question of an end of metaphysics
to one of identifying a fidelity to the event for which an event is a demonstrable change in the
logic of a given situation, be it social, political, or aesthetic. In Conditions (1992) Badiou asserts the
following:

The dominant idea [in the Heideggarian tradition] is that metaphysics has reached a point
of historical exhaustion, but that what lies beyond this exhaustion has not yet been given
to us []. Philosophy is then caught between the exhaustion of its historical possibility
and the non-conceptual arrival of a salutary overturning. Contemporary philosophy
combines the deconstruction of its past with the empty expectation of its future. My
entire goal is to break with this diagnosis [] Philosophy must break with historicism
from within itself (in Nancy 2004: 42).

Jean-Luc Nancy, responding to Badious desire to break with historicism and the preoccupation
with its exhaustion, has questioned the possibility of such a break in the light of the fact that, as he
sees it, metaphysics crucially is historical. The exhaustion of metaphysics is the exhaustion of
historical possibility as it has been developed in Western philosophy as a possibility of carrying any

62
conceptual structure (secular or religious) through to an end, to a final term. It is the limit
situation that calls into question the possibilities of beginnings and ends. Philosophy cannot be
absolved from its own historicity, which is what leads Nancy to develop the proposition of a
sense of the world that is anterior to beginnings and ends (Nancy 2004, 43).
For Badiou the present problem confronting metaphysical inquiry is one of an exhaustion
of historical possibility and the failure of a conceptual means to reassert philosophy, in response to
which he proclaims a necessary break with historicism. Because of this, the conditions of being
should be defined axiomatically through a form of neo-Platonism, that is, as concepts alone not
linked to the variations of poetics (Hallward 2004, 5). However, Nancy argues, it is necessarily a
poetics that is best placed to give evidence of the suspensions, interruptions and ruptures that
expose the conditions of being at their limits. Therefore, it is not a matter of breaking with
historicism, since metaphysics is historical, but instead, of making evident the limits of historical
possibility.
In an essay responding directly to Badious break with historicism Nancy argues that the
Western tradition of metaphysical history is a kind of physics, that is, it has always attempted to
distil its concepts into a natural history such that rationality is carried through to the point of
locating its incontrovertible ground. It is this notion of carrying through to an end that is
exhausted (Nancy 2004: 42). However, what remains after the exhaustion of the possibility of
defining an end point is precisely the sense of the world: the sense which emerges as a multiple,
fragmented real of existence that is made evident by its very limits. The constant interchange of
prescriptive meanings (a ripple effect of beginnings and ends, the constant production of principles
and objectives), what he calls the anxiety about meaning which has defined metaphysics, is
merely the recurring effect of a mythico-religious physics seeking to regain control of itself in
spite of metaphysics or through it (Nancy 2004: 47).
Since Nancys deconstructionist approach will figure substantially in relation to chapters
five to ten addressing the specific films, the question of his integration of the artwork into an
ontology of sense is central. For this reason, in the context of a parallel movement of philosophy
and aesthetics, the remainder of this chapter aims to set out the wider background of Nancys
position, prior to a closer examination in Chapter Four of aesthetics and the cinema.
For Nancy, philosophys real problem lies in its claim to the purity of concepts a
critique that can be traced back to his earliest writing on Kant and Descartes from the 1970s and

63
80s and the implication that because philosophy is itself dependent on language and the
perceptual conventions of literary production and technique its concepts can never be totally
pure. In Logodaedalus (1976), a reading of Kants Critique of Pure Reason, he highlights the
distinction between the key terms, Darstellung, or presentation and Dichtung, invention. In a
close study of Nancys thought Ian James highlights this central problem:

the clear and distinct presentation (Darstellung) of forms, concepts, categories, and so on,
[] cannot achieve the (mathematical) exactitude or adequation of presentation proper,
and so, as presentation, it also demands or is necessarily rooted in invention (Dichtung)
(James 2006: 40).

Metaphysics must necessarily engage in a radical ambivalence that seeks an a priori reason
abstracted from all sensible contingencies whilst forced to retain a discursive exposition that is
forever mitigated by the fluctuations of creative or rhetorical discourse. The conditions, or truth
procedures, that Badiou asserts for philosophy must themselves have a pre-condition which is
indissociably historical, technical and transcendental since it is necessary insofar as it is the
reason for philosophy as metaphysics, and yet contingent because there is no reason for this
reason (Nancy 2004: 47). This pre-condition that Nancy seeks to recognise is given the general
term sense in opposition to meaning and truth (Nancy 2004, 47). It contextualises all of
Nancys philosophical and aesthetic inquiry and is evidenced by the limit situations and fluctuating
motions that, through ceaseless agitation and the infinitization of ends, expose sense. It is not,
however, a process: that would imply a direction and therefore a beginning and end, rather than a
threshold or fluctuating border (Nancy 2004: 49). It is this delineation of the double-bind
between Darstellung and Dichtung that recurs in his approach to aesthetics and artworks and has a
bearing on his particular realist interpretation of the cinema.
Like Jacques Derrida and many of the generation of philosophers to emerge in France in
the late 1960s and early 70s, Nancy engages with the central question of the end or
overcoming of metaphysics that followed from the groundbreaking legacies of Nietzsche and
Heidegger. Nancy, then, seeks to untangle sense in the form of a shared material existence
sensitive to phenomena that already make sense prior to language or symbolic structures. This
sense is the element in which signification and meanings can be said to occur. Ian James has

64
pointed out that it is in such terms that Nancy can be seen as a particular kind of materialist and
realist philosopher, since his approach derives from the evidence of a shared, embodied
existence, but one that is not identified either with some underlying cause or timeless essence that
makes possible the world of appearances (James 2006: 9).
As Chapter Four will show in more detail, and with reference to previous realist
approaches to the cinema, it is through this realignment of realism that Nancy offers a differently
nuanced perspective on film. It diverts realism away from the overburdened legacies of an
indexical real world, and at the same time, removes any psychological unity, what might be
thought of as the shoring up of the subject as does the existential angst of modernism. Instead, it
offers a shared recognition of sensory experience that is simultaneously both symbolic and
phenomenological. At the same time, this sense both exceeds and never entirely fulfills its
terms. In this way, the real (of sense) operates in the same way whether applied to an indexically
realist film such as Elephant or Flanders, an indexically realist film with partial set-builds and shot in
monochrome, such as Stntang, or a film of studio artifice, trompe-loeil scenery and non-
naturalistic make-up effects, as in Roy Anderssons work.
Nancys reworking of realism as sense rethinks the terms of images especially
cinematic images as representations of a projected real world presented outside of itself to one
in which the world and its images are manifestly the same: they are fragments of that world,
giving onto that world. In this, they both reveal and withdraw truths, in the sense of fulfilled or
originary meanings, to continually exscribe meaning: the neologism Nancy adopts.

The thought of the sense of the world is a thought that, in the course of being-thought,
itself becomes indiscernable from its praxis, a thought that tendentially loses itself as
thought in its proper exposition to the world, a thought that exscribes itself there, that
lets sense carry it away, ever one step more, beyond signification and interpretation
(Nancy 1997: 9).

This sense of the world necessarily depends on a development of the formula for being-in-the-
world put forward by Heidegger: a formula that itself evolves from the radical rupture of the
systematic search for foundational or transcendent signifiers for knowledge put forward by
Nietzsche. His dismantling of the transcendent base of knowledge, be it the Judeo-Christian God

65
or the Platonic Idea, is then followed by Heideggers destruction of the traditions of individual,
anthropocentric beings.
At the same time Edmund Husserls phenomenological account of space and time presents
consciousness as that which is given purely from perceptual encounters with an always already
existing world. Ian James remarks of Husserls reasoning:

What interests Husserl is that within this constant flux, this mass of heterogeneous data
which makes up the preempirical expanse or diffusion of the senses, an order and a unity
occurs, which means that we perceive things, things which have their own self-same
identity and remain positioned within determinate contexts or locations and places.
(James 2006: 77).

Heidegger had challenged Husserls perspective on the basis that it was preoccupied with a system
of retentions and protentions pin-pointed on moments of presence interior to being-in-the-world.
In contrast, Heidegger was concerned with a state of being that is temporally rooted in the past
and thrust into the future. In short, experience is not interior to consciousness but always exterior
to it.

Heideggers insistence that the constitutive features of experience cannot be reduced to


mental states, but must be seen in terms of pragmatic worldly engagements, transforms
the phenomenological project from a search for atemporal, logical, and meaning-
constituting essences to an attempt to describe an event of being which would, in essence,
be historical and subject to a certain fundamental historicity (James 2006: 84).

Nancy aims to move beyond both Husserl and Heidegger, whilst retaining a degree of both, to
describe sense as an ontological term that accounts for the spatio-temporal event of being and as
existing before language and symbolic structures. He follows the phenomenological conception of
being as the spatio-temporal event of being: an opening onto what is intelligible as such, rather
than in terms of specific beings or entities. He also goes beyond the notion of grounded
consciousness as the locus of experience, attempting instead, to delineate being through an
opening onto, or a suspension of, a limit situation and a passage of sense.

66
Through this series of precedents Nancy arrives at a position not dissimilar from his
contemporary, Derrida. As he notes himself,

Neither a word nor a concept, writes Derrida of diffrance. This is, in short, the
definition of sense, or better, the sense of sense: to be neither word nor concept, neither
signifier nor signified, but sending and divergence, and nonetheless (or even for that very
reason) to be a gesture of writing, the breaking [frayage] and forcing of an a the entire
signification and destination of which (in French the [or in English the to] of the a) is to
exscribe itself: to go up and touch the concretion of the world where existence makes sense
(Nancy 1997: 14).

His principle divergence from Derrida comes from his readiness to put forward a material, bodily,
real of existence tuned to a multi-sensory experience. This realist aspect of Nancys ontology
circulates around the locus of the body which he insists is a lived, material existence before it is a
container for representations. He privileges the sense of touch to a greater extent than the visual
to the extent that he has even extended the sense of touch to his writing on the cinema: as a felt
contact with the evidence of the image and its succession instantaneously appearing and
disappearing (Nancy 2001: 42). Within the space of each image the representational symbols of
myth or tradition fluctuate with the phenomenological impressions of an always already existing
world. Together they combine to produce sense. It is not, as again Chapter Four considers more
closely, an either/or between the transcendent and the immanent.
Sense is configured as something other than the codes of representation, becoming a
touching or contact. In an elusive passage on painting Nancy writes that sense is characterised
by a clear obscurity (Nancy 1997: 81). He distinguishes the clarity of the obscure from the
Western tradition of chiaroscuro the rendering of contrasted light and shadow so much
associated with the photographic and cinematic traditions. Chiaroscuro seeks to present sense as a
mystery associated with an era of Western painting that participates in metaphysical revelations
or celebrations (Nancy 1997: 82). With the exhaustion of metaphysics, painting is on the
threshold between intactness and touching between the intactness and touching of light and
shadow (Nancy 1997: 82). Within the image that we see, we also feel and hear and taste: all these
aspects of experience remain infinitely intact. But that does not reveal everything. At this limit

67
always attained and always withdrawn, sense is suspended, not as sense more or less deciphered,
but as the obscure tact of clarity itself (Nancy 1997: 83). Finally, this passage can be extended to
artworks in general: there is no art that is not the art of a clear touch on the obscure threshold of
sense (Nancy 1997: 83).
In this way we can begin, for example, to see the implacable whale of Werckmeister
Harmonies as a clear obscurity. This creature or object is presented in the film, as it is presented
to the small Hungarian town of the story, as the mystery of light and shadow and the promise
that from the void of darkness within its container some illumination, or revelation, will transpire.
To that end it is loaded with metaphysical expectations, fuelled by apocalyptic prognostications
and the murmuring intensity of the gathering crowd in search, seemingly, of some meaning or
event to coincide with its arrival, its symbolism. But it remains implacable to the last. After the
riot, when it is finally fully exposed to the misty daylight amid the wreckage of its container, it
continues to be itself: instantly recognisable, but resolutely refusing to give up secrets at all. It is
both present and absent present as a whale, or its carcass but dead, absent as life or the life of
that whale. It is a side-show exhibit. It may not even be a real whale but a fake: instantly
recognisable as a fake whale. As an object it is the limit of real and unreal, mystery and revelation.
Everything in the film seems driven or derived from this whale, or its arrival. Its eye remains
fixedly open, staring, but not revealing. Everything about the whale is both known and unknown,
felt but not understood. It is something both more and less than a plot-device. It is not wedded
to characters or events in a relation of causality. Its arrival is no more or less effective than the
weather. In Nancys terms, it is exscribed into the film.
From an aesthetic perspective, it is identified as a fragment of sense in itself, a
presentation of sense, rather than a representation of a grounded idea, whether immanent or
transcendent. What is exscribed (rather than inscribed within the logic of established models of
meaning) is that which simultaneously resists inscription and remains undecidable (in the
common terms of deconstruction). It is those elements that interrupt and suspend any attempt at
laying a metaphysical foundation. Artworks can then be seen as material artefacts that in turn
present a shared world and experiential events that make sense despite resisting their reduction
into the conformity of tradition or predetermined orders or genres of signification. Sense, for
Nancy, is less concerned with the imitation of a phenomenal reality than it is present in the
sensible, material aspects of the work and its disturbance of meaning.

68
The prioritising of the sensible and sensuous stems from a concept of aesthetics first
claimed by Hegel. Art has entered its final phase (which for Hegel was Romantic art), the
reconciliation of spirit (or idea) in the manifestation (or form) that provides a concrete
presentation of the absolute. As Ian James points out, this is the apotheosis of art in accord with
the terms of Hegels own dialectic system (James 2006: 209). Nancy, however, locates a
blockage in this dialectic that is (as with Kants Critique of Pure Reason) located around the
problem that neither the language of philosophy nor the language of literature (and art) is entirely
sufficient to achieve the effect it desires. This blockage is an irreducible and irresolvable
impossibility of reconciliation between expression and absolute knowledge or speculative thought.
It is precisely this impasse, or limit situation, that gives rise to the opportunity of the artwork
connecting with sense. An artwork is not the achievement of its own dialectical unity, nor the
impossibility of such, but the points and moments in which the functioning of such dialectics is
interrupted or suspended. It is at these moments that a presentation or a disclosure of the world
occurs.
This presentation becomes the presentation of the artworks own present, its figure or
form, and it is the presentation of sense, the sense of an always already present manifestation of
the world. This is the realism around which the twin configurations of presentation or presence
come together. Nancy writes:

Art isolates or forces the moment of the world as such, the being-world of the world, not
as a milieu in which a subject moves, but as exteriority and exposition of a being-in-the-
world, exteriority and exposition grasped formally, isolated and presented as such.
Therefore the world is dislocated into plural worlds, or more exactly, into an irreducible
plurality of the unity world. (in James 2006: 218)

This opening onto the plurality of the world, of sense, carries itself over, in principle, to the
specific operation of the cinema:

Cinema its screen, its sensitive membrane stretches and hangs between a world in
which representation was in charge of the signs of truth, of the heralding of a meaning, or

69
of the warrant of a presence to come; and another world that opens onto its own presence
through a voiding where its thoughtful evidence realizes itself. (Nancy 2001: 56)

This sense can equally disregard the potential anachronism of the image of the screen stretched
and hung. Whether the cinema remains as reflected light on a screen, or is seen as a back
projected image or as a digital screen image, the fundamental point to take from Nancys
illustration is that of an orientation on the part of the film, of the act of filming as an act of
looking, that seeks to realise and bring forward those aspects of the world that escape or refuse
meaning, to formally assemble an excess of passing evidence that persistently resists integration
into a representation of any sort of meaning, whether that meaning is located in a narrative-
dramatic system or a subject oriented identity.
This attitude or orientation toward a film-making that seeks to look and thereafter, to
show, before or despite its intention or ability to represent is similarly evoked by the Austrian
director Ulrich Seidl. He has remarked on the difference between an attitude that seeks to
interrogate film images for meaning and one that seeks to identify film images with aspects of the
world: I think that, too often, we tend to judge films by whether theyre optimistic or whether
theyre dark or pessimistic. Thats not the first question for me at all. I think the first question
should be why I show something and how I show it (Seidl 2009).
That which Seidl presents as a question, a challenge, (why do I show this?), Nancy presents
as creation, or the point of creation and the possibility of a new thought, a new reflection; what he
calls a birth in place of death that has so fascinated Western thought (Nancy 1993: 3).

Before all representational grasp, before a consciousness and its subject, before science,
and theology, and philosophy, there is that: the that of, precisely, there is. But there is is
not itself a presence, to which our signs, our demonstrations, and our monstrations might
refer. One cannot refer to it or return to it: it is always, already, there, but neither in
the mode of being (as a substance) not in that of there (as a presence). It is there in the
mode of being born: to the degree that it occurs, birth effaces itself, and brings itself
indefinitely back. Birth is the slipping away of presence through which everything comes
to presence (Nancy 1993: 4).

70
It is here, that, in something like a re-focusing on the real (of sense) that the cinematic image
can point to a certain kind of redemption its weak messianism.
In summary, the end of the Cold War and Soviet Communism has led to the suggestion
that history itself has reached an impasse. In place of a post-war modernism still wedded to certain
teleologies of political and subjective emancipation, we have been left with a post-historical void
a post-modernity that revels in the reconstitution of traditional paradigms, either as irony or
pastiche; an endless simulacrum of appearances without context or content; or the perpetual crisis
of community that is marked by constant relativism. In each case we are left with an endless
repetition of the bad: of violence and destruction redeployed as spectacle (political or aesthetic)
and devoid of redemption in anything other than its most fundamental form of reifying dogma,
whether in the form of religious terror or the consumption of commercially defined aesthetics.
As a counterpoint to this set of conditions, this thesis argues that certain films from within
this period suggest an alternative orientation toward the redemptive wager through an aesthetic
practice that resembles particular philosophical positions. These films set out in the introduction,
have especially sought to emphasise and, at the same time, problematise the symbols of
redemption through a formula of presentation and withdrawal that recalls both Jacques Derridas
suggestive conception of a hauntology and, more specifically, Jean-Luc Nancys configuration of
sense as the reinscription of traces of experience and world events for which the film is a
fragment of that sense.
Derrida creates a conceptual term for the refusal of the past and its demands on the future
to be laid to rest; a term that specifically highlights the interruption in the present and towards the
future, and that which remains unaccounted for. In this respect, he reasserts the Christian legacy
of messianism, not in its figural sense, nor that of any image or narrative, but simply through the
affect of the demand. Nancy recasts the ephemeral and translucent character of the spectre into
the real itself: into a material or evident image in the artwork; the ghost, as such, becomes a
fragment of sense.
Robert Stam, in his introductory gloss of the development of film theory, observes that in
the wake of Derridas early writings, a partial lexicon of Derridean terms (trace,
dissemination, logocentrism, excess) entered film theoretical discourse, particularly via the
French journal Tel Quel and was especially developed by writers such as Julia Kristeva (Stam
2000:180). However, as Stam points out, this writing tended to overburden an aesthetic militancy

71
that sought to find explicitly political discourse from the disruption of traditional forms (Stam
2000: 181-2); a tendency that continued to tie political discourse to the binary of disruptive
montage and self-reflexivity of apparatus.
In an early article in this vein, Ellipsis on Dread and the Specular Seduction, Kristeva,
writing of the screen/viewer relationship in the genres of horror and thriller, opposes the terms
speculation a reassuring, socialising signification of the image and specular the monstrous
trace or terror that erupts into the seen. The specular is found in the forms of primary
processes (displacements, condensations, tones, rhythms, colors, patterns), always in excess as
compared with the represented, the signified (Kristeva 1986: 237). She extracts those elements
in the image that are in excess of signification and loads them with a performative task: they must
be made to speak via distanciation and demystification (Kristeva 1976: 242), the anti-narrative,
anti-conformist tropes of modernism, rather than speak via themselves as a contact with the world
at the limits of representation.
Prior to responding with Nancys version of excess and trace, as well as elaborating on
his realism with respect to the cinemas long engagement with that term, the following chapter
will pay some attention to the modernist configuration of both the real and its redemptive
implications. The reason for this is twofold: firstly, it underscores the historically and politically
inflected account of the cinema that sees realism as inscribed into an imperfect ideological model,
an account that Nancys ontological themes seek to escape. Secondly, it raises the question of
redemption as an aesthetic or conceptual practice, formulated around the articulation of montage
and, in short, asks: what exactly is being redeemed?

72
CHAPTER 3

Redemption as an Aesthetic or Conceptual Practice

The French film theorist, Serge Daney, interviewed Jean-Luc Godard in 1988 as the director was
completing the first parts of Histoire(s) du cinma (1989), his intense videographic account of a
century of cinema. As Godard down-loaded the images of one hundred years of cinema directly
into twentieth century history and its political ideologies, Daney observed that the interstitial
means of articulation had been elevated to become the intrinsically historical element, the
centurys force:

Godards fundamental premise hasnt changed: the cinema has always sought only one
thing montage something twentieth-century man has desperately needed (Daney
1992: 159).

In this interpretation, montage has become the measure of modernity and, more than that, the
means of both cinemas and modernitys collective redemption.
What this chapter aims to highlight is that the question of the truth and fiction of the
cinema its innocence and guilt formulated by the essential articulation of montage, is an
overburdened one; that this force a constant movement, whether as part of myth or dialectical
synthesis is always seeking some kind of overcoming. In Chapter Four, we will return to Jean-
Luc Nancys reorientation of the real through an emphasis on the cinemas essential looking. As
he writes in The Evidence of Film, This is not about the fascination of images: it is about images
insofar as they open onto what is real and insofar as they alone open onto it. The reality of images
is the access to the real itself [] (Nancy 2001: 16). As such, montage needs to be reconfigured
through suspension or hiatus; as a failure to assert or construct meaning and as, instead, the
interruption of meaning that opens onto the excess of sense. Moreover, and in respect of the
themes of violence and evil/fallibility, montage itself has been equally overburdened by its own
implicit violence its formal violence and as the locus of the violent within the cinema. From
the early cinema of attractions to the presence and absence of the terms of the final solution at

73
Auschwitz, proclaimed by Godard, montage as history, destruction and restitution comes to the
fore.
Godards Histoire(s) du cinma, as Jacques Rancire has meticulously argued in Film Fables,
attempts to redeem the iconicity of images from their corruption in the power-politics of
representation and from the insistence of traditional (bourgeois) stories; from the organisational
articulation of order out of the disorder of historical events. Only when the cinema can truly
recognise a pure presence in its images can it resist its betrayal by the coercion of selective
meaning and find its truth. The film image, in this account, resembles the veil of Veronica
(Rancire 2006: 182), the true image of the face of Christ made by its contact with the cloth
used to wipe his brow during the stations of the cross. Godard seeks to retrieve those fragmentary
images of cinemas history, torn from its stories, melodramas, or the factual accounts of its
newsreels, to recast them, retrospectively, as the lost glimpses that foreshadowed the catastrophe
to come: a point made explicit in his juxtaposition of the images and stark lighting of Weimar
cinema with Nurembergs fictions and its spectacles of power. To do this, however, Godard
himself has to rely on the intrinsically retrospective use of montage, separating out the plot points
or the fragments of suspense, jeopardy, or revelation from the formulae of narrative, to
reconstitute them strategically as the instants in which the cinema failed to recognise the truths it
could tell: cinema dramatized time and again the delirium of power in fiction and the revenge of
the real on the fictional. But this very anticipation spells out a new guilt: cinema failed to
recognize the catastrophe it itself announced, it failed to see what its images foretold (Rancire
2006: 181).
The irony that Godard cannot avoid, as Rancire concludes, is that to free the icons of
history from the manipulation of stories he must resort to the formal unification of retrospective
montage: History, properly speaking, is this relationship of interiority that puts every image into
relation with every other; it is what allows us to be where we are not, forge all the connections
that had not been forged, and then replay all the (hi)stories differently (Rancire 2006, 186).
Godard enforces the redemptive necessity of this act of replaying by ordaining it with a
provocatively religious determination. The declaration that The Image will come at the
Resurrection evokes a Christological emphasis on a redemption of the spirit of the image freed
from its consubstantiality in the fallen flesh of the body of the text, or its particular narratives
and particular histories. There is something of the self-flagellating zealot at work behind Godards

74
project to save the cinema at the very same time as ending it, effectively, in the apocalyptic
couplet of exploding its archive into fragments and judging the fragments from their initial present
against the past catastrophes of history a ploy that clearly recalls Walter Benjamins Angel of
History hurtling into the future whilst gazing backwards at the wreckage piling in its wake
(Benjamin 1999: 249).
The spectre of Benjamin looms large over Godards project. Much as the angel continues
to be blown unstoppably away from paradise for Godard perhaps a cinematic Eden at the gates
of the Lumire Factory so Histoire(s) continued to pile its wreckage throughout the 1990s,
producing a towering eight parts by 1998. Nevertheless, the proclamation that The Image will
come at the Resurrection comes from the first section released in 1989 and underpins the
essential binarism of Godards historical account one that aligns Europe and the lost national
cinemas of Soviet montage, German Expressionism, French poetic realism and Italian neo-realism
in a political stance against the hegemony of a Hollywood-dominated, and fascist inspired,
industrial monolith. It is a binarism that also recalls Benjamins seminal essay The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which concerns, ranging widely across the radical
consciousness-changing experience of modernity, alight, finally, on the aesthetic/political split:
that of an instrumental rationality that renders (fascist) ideology aesthetic and for which a
communist response must reside in the politicisation of art a politicisation for which montage is
its means (Benjamin 1999: 230). Yet Benjamin had also identified, in perhaps the most enigmatic
portion of the essay, the possibility of a glimpse of an irreducible reality the orchid in the land
of technology (Benjamin 1999: 226) that can counter the reality effect that burdens cinematic
images with ideology. Miriam Hansen has identified this metaphor as underlying Benjamins
attempts to point to a mode of experience founded on the optical unconscious (Hansen 1987:
208). Like Freuds linguistic slips or, later, Barthes photographic punctum it reflects those
moments in which a fragment of the real, an element that escapes the orders of signification or
the Symbolic, sneaks into the photographic image unnoticed. It disrupts its intentions and
resonates with unexpected inflections as well as, in a retrospective mode, isolates a point where
images can themselves return to proclaim their own undoing. Hansen establishes how, in
Benjamins terms, such a reality is not determined simply by its mimetic capacities but, rather,
by the attitude of looking consistent with the mode of the flaneur that registers the sediments
of experience that are no longer or not yet claimed by social and economic rationality (Hansen

75
1987: 209). It is this attitude of looking that Godard proclaims the cinema to have ultimately
turned away from. Instead, as Rancire observes, it surrendered the power of its mute speech to
the tyranny of words and the power of its images to the huge industry of fiction, the industry of
sex and death that substitutes for our gaze a world illusorily in accord with our desires (Rancire
2006: 180).
Godard, like Benjamin before him, alludes to a purity of image configured as indelible
moments, fragmentary instants in which the contingent, the untainted or the unsignified breaks
through the faade of ideological spectacle. He reduces the manipulations of narrative or historical
discourse to isolated acts, gestures or still images, in effect, freezing the moving image at the point
at which he freezes history, to pronounce guilty the failure of cinema to recognise what its images
reveal of history. For Godard, in retrospect, the cinema itself is fallen. As Rancire concludes,
[m]aybe the most intimate melancholy of Godards project is that it demonstrates everywhere the
innocence of this art that should be guilty in order to prove, a contrario, its sacred mission
(Rancire 2006: 186).
Godards project is ultimately a modernist one, in the sense that he retains a nostalgia for
a cinema that could radically intervene in the world, even revolutionise it. Its failure, for which it
is guilty, is the failure to effect an alternative history. Yet the timing of the initial release of
Histoire(s), coinciding with the collapse of European communism, draws attention to the link
between the centurys modernist revolutionary rhetoric for which the conceptual aesthetics of
montage advocated by Godard, as by Benjamin before him was so crucial.
It is worth noting the distinction that James Monaco draws between the different terms of
montage and editing. Editing the term identified with the practices of classical narrative
developed predominantly through the American studio system is a function of paring back, of
cutting down, with the declared objective of an invisibility that concentrates all attention on the
flow of narrative, action and empathy. Montage a term more popular in European film
historical developments implies a function of building, working up from the raw material, and
culminates in the objective of a construction or a synthesis (Monaco 2000: 216). It can be
destructive but its destruction is necessarily revolutionary. Hence, a modernist aesthetics of
montage is built on an essential violence, a shattering or breaking apart of perceived norms with
the aim of establishing a new foundation. In short, early modern cinema attempted to explode the
unity of a classical cinema that was based on the narrative and representational logic of a certain

76
kind of nineteenth-century literary drama by initiating a radicalised unity of form from the raw
material of modernity. A late modern cinema then attempts to come to terms with so many
failures of modernity as a loss of meaning configured in a century that had brought about so many
catastrophes, and assemble its dislocated images in an existential movement of the subject towards
death. The post-modern cinema, in attempting to overcome this loss of meaning, only betrays its
obsession with meaning in its ironic restitution of classical traditions.
Through this repetition of foundation and overhaul there is a rhetorical sense of active
nihilism in the history of cinema. Recalling Critchleys description of the desire to declare the
present world meaningless and to overthrow it a perspective with a complex and tantalising
relation to utopian, revolutionary and radically violent political movements (Critchley 2007: 5)
the idea of cinema presents a formal and aesthetic means to envision the challenge to ideologies.
Montage (the thing twentieth century man has desperately needed) determines the violent
destruction and restitution of the perceptual world. Such rhetoric does not, however, escape
nihilism; it does not confer a status or possibility for the cinema, only a commentary on the ends
to which montage is put. In this sense, editing and montage reflect a passive and active
nihilism: the latter as a destruction or exhaustion of an ideologically meaningless situation; the
former as a kind of agnostic delirium, reifying conformity at the same time as it revels in its
aesthetic destruction. The logic of both reaches its apparent zenith in the collision of montage with
speed: the editing practice of excessive cutting (interlinked with explosive special effects) for
which the collateral damage to bodies, architectures and landscapes disappears in the oblivion of
acceleration. The edit is the cinemas sleight-of-hand, as it has been in its treatment of violence,
since Hepworths Explosion of a Motor Car (1900). The principle of slow cinema as a critical
alternative to the acceleration of editing technique has emerged in the British film journal Sight and
Sound (James 2010: 5). The work of Bla Tarr has been at the forefront of this critical alignment,
always placed in opposition to a Hollywood derived model of fast cutting (see Orr 2001; Kovcs
2004).
Paul Virilio has consistently critiqued the acceleration of culture and the nihilism of
modern technological media under the rubric of an aesthetics of disappearance (Virilio 2006). As
a Catholic-inspired theorist (Redhead 2004: 12), Virilio, in terms reminiscent of Ricoeur, has
proposed a necessary realignment of the symbolic within representation as an alternative to a
perceived loss of meaning through both modernist and post-modernist artworks whose

77
abstraction, fragmentation and relativism has eroded the pedagogy of the image through delivery
of the immediacy of an event or experience (Virilio 2006: 19). Such restitution is eschewed,
however, by Nancys assertion of the need to challenge the dialectical arrangement of wholeness
and fragmentation (Nancy 1997: 123). Film, whose constituent parts are always already
fragments, should be approached through a perspective that does not insist on the dialectics of
montage (fragmentation and wholeness) as the primary mode of analysis. In this way, the contrast
of slowness and speed, centred on the continual opposition of contemplative art cinema and
commercial entertainment cinema can be side-stepped. The slowness and minimal cutting of
Tarrs films, or the single shot to each scenic tableau approach of Roy Anderssons films, are less a
measure of a militant conceptual practice and more the demand for a primary engagement with
the world exposed in fragments but not as fragments that reassert an aesthetic autonomy.
Godards modernist montage seeks a community of fragments. But the contradiction that
his project betrays is that this coming together must demand an ultimate unification under a sign
of truth the word of Godard as its new foundation. Dissection and isolation bring together
a century of images to re-present the past. Where Godard accuses the cinema of the past of
turning away from the true images of its present, so he too, turns away from the images of his
immediate milieu, proclaiming instead that milieu to be an historical break an end of history.
Such a break collapses the rhetoric of a modernity bound, in the broadest sense, to the teleological
project of communism, of community, recalling Benjamins shortcircuiting of the iconic means
of the cinematic image with the political engagement of the masses (Hansen 1987, 205).
In place of the clearly defined political goals or sympathies of such a modernity comes the
oft-cited generalism that post-modernity gives credence to a cinema that revels only in the
restitution of archetypes and the reinvigoration of genres, of pastiche and irony, of polyvalence
and self-awareness. French philosopher, Alain Badiou has recently gone so far as to characterise
this latter milieu of the post-modern and the period following the collapse of European
communism as a second Restoration, acerbically chiding its liberal politics of consensus with a
sideswipe at the end of history debate since, he says, a restoration is never anything other than a
moment in history that declares revolutions to be both abominable and impossible, and the
superiority of the rich both natural and excellent (Badiou 2007: 26). It follows that for Badiou the
cinema, which he elsewhere calls neo-classical, similarly restores the dominance of generic story
archetypes at the expense of a modernist formalism (Badiou 2005: 83-94). Suffice it to say here

78
that Badiou seems to reiterate Godards declaration of an historical break allied with an aesthetic
restoration, and to lapse back into a binary opposition between an all too sweeping classical
Hollywood and a modernist Europe and, therefore, ultimately fails, or refuses, to consider the
liminal space opened out amid the ruins of the collapsed pillars of a binary historical opposition.
Like Godard, Badiou also fails to consider the possibility, posed by Rancire and again by Nancy,
of a cinematic image cut loose from the powers of conceptual montage.
Godards provocation that The Image will come at the Resurrection posits a
redemption of the images of cinemas past based on the explicitly Christian hierarchy of the
dualistic separation of spirit and matter, soul and body here applied to the cinematic image,
replayed, reanimated, resurrected for which the spirit, given meaning by the application of the
Word (its retrospective truth) takes precedence over the dead matter of the image and the
narrative context from which it was extracted, as from an autopsy. It is because of this dualistic
structure that the image can be redeemed in this mode of address since, as Rancire points out,
the cinemas images, though innocent, have already been pronounced guilty to prove their sacred
mission.
The principal argument of this chapter, then, is that a recurring theme of retrospective
revisionism of film history takes place around the locus of an aesthetic break or end
commensurate with the post-historical era. As well as Godard and Badiou, films by Chris Marker
and Guy Debord, and film theoretical texts by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben offer a
concerted effort to redeem or resurrect the images of history and of cinema. At the same time,
each asserts montage as the power that overcomes representation. In doing so, they ultimately
deliver a contradictory restitution of the real. It is this contradiction that will point us towards
Nancys real, as sense, and the film as a fragment of experience. It offers an alternative approach
to the films that follow, films that more clearly mirror the philosophical terms of post-history set
out in chapter two. This realignment seeks to redirect the locus of cinema away from the stories it
tells to that of the forms of life it exposes; away from the locus of severance and the cut as point of
closure in a circuit of constructed meaning towards an erosion of the links and limits of each
image. The diminishing power of vision, as Nikolai enters the darkening tunnel at the close of The
Asthenic Syndrome, or the gradual boarding up of the window, and therefore the cameras point-of-
view, in Stntang, the gradual backing away from the final gun-point stand-off in Elephant, or the

79
descent into the mist and fog of Russian Ark reiterate the continual suspension or dissolution of
images in place of the decisiveness of the cut.
It is, in a sense, the conceptual impetus of montage and its crucial role in the
development of attitudes and perspectives, archetypal relations and dogmatic dialectics that
ultimately posit what Alberto Toscano has called the crisis within the horizon of representation
(Toscano 2007: 181). It is, briefly, to that history that this chapter now turns.
The film director Gus Van Sant, when questioned over the treatment of violence in
Elephant, his 2003 film of a Columbine-style high school shooting, responded with a reference to
the Hollywood industry journal Varietys accusation that the film was irresponsible (McCarthy
2003). He argued that people were angered by the films depiction of violence the same people
who love Kill Bill think our film is irresponsible because theyre believing it, and I want them
to believe it: I want it to matter, not to be gratuitous violence. Its not entertainment. Its
something else (in Sad 2004: 18).
Van Sants elusive something else is couched in the suggestive terms of the earliest
observational films of the Lumire Brothers made at the very beginning, the pre-narrative era, of
cinema history:

Since 1915, when people started to use editing to tell a story, weve had the convention
of the reaction shot: I say something, then we cut to your reaction, and thats part of
telling a story. But life is a continuous thing with a rhythm of its own, and when you cut
to adjust that rhythm to suit the dramatic impact you create a new, false rhythm. (in Sad
2004: 17)

Despite Van Sants truncated characterisation of editing as the classical paradigm of the reaction
shot that engineers and manipulates the audiences knowledge or empathy, what he seeks to
emphasise is a mode of shot construction that seeks to observe the rhythmic tension of an already
happening world rather than restrict such tensions to the necessities of a principle of
predetermined articulation or dramaturgy. It points to a change of obligation for the practice of
film-making, even a regression of sorts, to share a point-of-view that is looking, above a point-
of-view that is concluding or defining. It is, in effect, a shift from the fascination with

80
representation what do images mean in relation to each other to a question of what image-
content can be presented or disclosed; in short, a shift of emphasis from concept to sense.
Alain Badiou has argued that what defined the twentieth century, in opposition to the
utopian or scientific ideals of the nineteenth, was the passion for the real (Badiou 2007: 32 italics
in original), the aim of delivering the ideal as act in itself. For Badiou, this provides an axiom that
qualifies equally for large-scale projects (Communism, National Socialism) and small-scale,
individual acts (such as in conceptual or performance art). Montage, in such terms, also becomes a
real act upon the images of everyday life. Before the Second World War it was characterised as
the aesthetic means to make manifest the revolutionary turmoil of a Europe recoiling in the
aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917 an instrument of the
active nihilism of Bolshevism. It was the means by which the multiple fragments of an everyday
history, its masses, its moments, human and inhuman, of nature and machine, could be combined
to reveal their elementary contribution to the great projects of emancipation, or else they would
be, as they were, co-opted into the burgeoning spectacles of Fascist or capitalist power. This was
the benchmark set in Benjamins famous essay. In it, the comparison of the cameraman with the
surgeon who cuts into the patients body, as the metaphor for the penetration of realitys web
by a camera that produces multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law (Benjamin
1999: 227), is replete with the double-edged violence that Benjamin uses throughout the essay
(and elsewhere). It is the cutting, or penetration, that can heal but also violate in its misuse: a
double-edged violence that finds its locus in the aphoristic finale that condenses into a binary of
distraction and concentration (Benjamin 1999: 232) through historys the violent confrontations:

Mankind, which in Homers time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods,
now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its
own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics
which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. (Benjamin
1999: 235)

Underlying the political truths that Benjamin seeks to arrange in the Janus-face of political power
and its representation is the broader philosophical ambiguity of truth as a violent irruption. In a
reflection on aesthetics, Nancy discusses this ambiguity in the relationship between image and

81
violence, violence and truth, truth and image. An ugly violence (racist, coercive) makes itself true
in being violent; a necessary violence (the acknowledged ambiguity spoken of in terms of divine,
revolutionary, interpretative violence) unleashes its violence because of the necessity of its truth.
The former exhausts itself in its act, the latter suspends itself in the penetration of being itself by
violence (whatever the name of being: subject, history, force) (Nancy 2005: 18).
Soviet montage exemplified a revolutionary, interpretative violence that is imagined and
acted upon the images of the present; on all images, whether they depict the insurrectionary
conflict of Battleship Potemkin (1925) or the thickening of cream in The General Line (1929). By
contrast, the images of violence and destruction (all the accidents, murders, executions and
assassinations of early cinema) inherited from the fairgrounds, freak shows and popular press,
conformed to the moralising of accepted historical, dramatic and societal discourses.
As the continuing presence of conflict, exploitation, violence and degradation continues
apace within the socio-political conditions left in the wake of the former Cold War structure,
Benjamins insistence on the question of a distraction or concentration around the aesthetico-
political gives way to an open-ended era of destruction for aesthetic pleasure. The argument here
proposed is that the resistance to such pleasure comes not from the alternative demands of the
modernist, couched in the terms of an articulated, self-reflexive montage and the grounding of a
particular politics, but in the insistence on the gaze, the exposure to the violent content of the
image at the limit situation of its articulation. As Nancy concludes:

Violence without violence consists in the revelations not taking place, its remaining
imminent. Or rather it is the revelation of this: that there is nothing to reveal. By
contrast, violent and violating violence reveals and believes that it reveals absolutely. Art
is not a simulacrum or an apotropaic form that would protect us from unjustifiable
violence (from Nietzches Gorgon-truth or Freuds blind instinct). It is the exact
knowledge of this: that there is nothing to reveal, not even an abyss, and that the
groundless is not the chasm of a conflagration, but imminence infinitely suspended over
itself (Nancy 2005: 26).

Montage, as an attempt to make sense of such acts through an intervention, fracturing and
reconstruction seeks to recover meaning through its own act of violence as such. Montage

82
configured as the mechanism of redemption thereby redeems attempts to distinguish a raw
image from the veneer of a represented fiction. However, the elevation to primacy of the shot
offers a demand, not through the mechanism of association but as an orientation, calling into
question an act through a delineation of its happening. It locates itself in the particular orientation
of filming, of presentation, that interrupts the taking place of signification and meaning leading to
a suspense, an imminence that remains incomplete and hanging over itself. Primacy is given to the
shot that exposes the taking place of a fragment of sense at the same time as withdrawing recourse
to the logic of counter-shot or dialectic that confers a determined empathy or interpretation.
Hence the logic of montage as it has been rhetorically played out in the cinema is necessary to
locate this shift from a focus on the terms of re-presented images to the presentation of images as
an exposure of sense as an obligation toward that which takes place in the world.
Important work in the 1980s by Tom Gunning, Nel Burch, Andr Gaudreault, among
others re-examined the earliest films from the so-called pre-narrative (pre-1910) period that
Van Sant evokes. They looked at these films according to the principles of their editing techniques
and as such, laid out a structural course that at one and the same time identified the systems out of
which narrative logic emerged as the hegemony of classical narrative. They alluded to the
possibility that such a formula for narrative was not an historical inevitability but an act of
ideological coercion and that at its core, the cinema retains the means to present sensuous
phenomena within configurations that eschew the paradigms of dramatic narrative as it has come
to dominate. Gaudreault adopted the term monstration (Gaudreault 1990) to draw attention to
the act of showing that was initially given primacy over telling.
Gunning and Gaudreault called the cinema operating within initial categories of
monstration a cinema of attractions (Gunning 1990: 101). The key innovation of these
theorists was to posit the early pre-narrative phase of cinema as a distinct method and not as
simply the primitive struggles of a narrative form yet to find its full articulation. Such cinematic
techniques revelled in a particular mode of display derived from conjuring tricks and theatrical and
musical hall performance. Most importantly, these early films were enframed rather than
emplotted (Gunning 1990: 101). Whilst ultimately their content turned to the illusionistic rather
than the realistic, once the fascination for pure actualities wore off, their essential mode of
address pointed to a cinematic orientation that placed the immediacy and imminence of
confrontation above the manipulation and ultimate transcendence of a predetermined exposition.

83
Mary Ann Doane, also writing on the earliest period of film history and the development
of its form and narrative, argues that the cinema becomes a key instrument of representation in
late nineteenth and early twentieth century modernitys obsession with the quantifying and
mastering of contingency to the extent that violence and forms of death the irreversible are
abundant (Doane 2002). At stake in Doanes argument is the demonstrable link between the
objective representation of temporality and the subjective abstraction of temporal existence such
that contingency confirmed in the system becomes the site of both pleasure and anxiety. The
contingent is, in effect, structurally necessary to the ideologies of capitalist modernization
(Doane 2002: 11). Contingency introduces an aspect of normal life into the representation of
time. However, Doanes central theme is precisely that the cinema played a crucial part in
modernitys taming of chance for the purpose of establishing a representational formula for
existence:

The cinemas struggles with contingency repeat, in the field of representation, the
taming of chance that takes place in sociology, philosophy, and the sciences during
roughly the same time period. [] [T]he growing acknowledgement and acceptance of
chance and indeterminism did not imply chaos or a loss of control. To the contrary, it
consolidated the lawlike regularities of statistics and probability, and encouraged the
growing numerical quality of knowledge (Doane 2002: 170).

Effectively the cinema becomes complicit in an overall ideological drive by capitalist modernity to
rationalise the catastrophe of chance. It enacts a kind of active nihilism in its overcoming of the
sense of meaninglessness associated with chance or contingency to enforce meaning through the
ordering of fragments. Within mass culture it actively seeks to turn contingency into the thrill of
the spectacle. To eradicate the potential boredom of dead time it reduces contingency to an
ultimately manageable control, consistency and survivability when faced with the jeopardy of
events.

Temporality hence became the site of the critical control and regulation of cinematic
meaning. The cinema had a stake in not allowing the event to fall outside of the domain of
structure. In the cinema, as in much theoretical writing of the period, it would be more

84
accurate to say that the event comes to harbor contingency within its very structure
(Doane 2002: 171).

Doanes book makes a case for the inevitability of classical narrative in the cinema and the rupture
by the contingent that defines all subsequent anti-narrative alternatives couched in oppositional
terms, with their preoccupation with the descriptive and subjective, over and above the organising
principles of plot and action or cause and effect. Here, the cinema performs a representational
role in the wider project of industrial modernity: the subjection of contingency to conformity.
Accordingly, the earliest films of sporadic scenes and interrupting camera stoppage posed the
threat of [] a denial of representation itself (Doane 2002: 31). The classical conventions that
were developed by the second decade of cinemas existence provided the means to structure time
and contingency in ways that mimicked or supported the broader rationalisation of time as the
medium of cause and effect in an industrialised modernity. In this respect, the classical narrative
presents a balm for the various assaults and violent ricochets that modernity, in all its
manifestations of speed and energy, sensual bombardment, information overload can throw at
its subjects. Montage organises the flow of fear and anxiety and configures the expedients of
modernitys dark underbelly, of shock, horror or catastrophe, into a regime of order. Time and
contingency, however, are mere abstractions that narrative opens out into the wider concerns of
cultural and historical attention, of real intractable problems such as accident, violence or death.
Doanes argument recognises an instrumental use of the cinema as an underpinning of the central,
subject-oriented concept of narrative.
At other times, however, montage takes on expressly political and historical implications
the kind of active nihilism associated with the utopian or the revolutionary. Discontinuity as
foundational truth finds its apogee in Soviet montage derived as the means to realise the modernist
desire for a dialectical form that would resonate with the modernist project. Eisenstein had
already coined the term a cinema of attractions as the label for the radical innovations of the
early Soviet cinema in its bid to awaken the masses from their complacency and respond to the
rallying call of the new Soviet century. However, Dziga Vertov deemed Eisensteins dialectical
montage too conservative. He imagined that pure sensation, rendered as a constructivist material
by the artifice of the interval, the cut, would speak for itself, and in turn, speak for a world
ushered in by the new Soviet man (Toscano 2007: 183). Vertov, the filmmaker, theorist and

85
director of Man With a Movie Camera (1928), exemplifies the radical intentions applied to montage
by early modernism. As Alberto Toscano has noted, Vertovs theories collapse an ontology of
cinema (its movements, both in and of the camera) into the fundamental element of its
articulation, the interval, that is the jarring rupture of flow that the cut implies; not a suture but a
gaping wound. Vertov uses the metaphorical language of the cinema as an organism and the sheer
violence of montage, and the interval which cutting creates, to fashion a ripping apart of reality
to spill its guts. Cinema is a little over twenty years old as Vertov wishes to kill it, so that it can
be born again as the inhuman machine eye (the kino-eye) that will rescue the coming people
from their tired, bourgeois existence. Vertov wishes to emancipate the images of the world from
the Nietzschean nihilism of tradition (Toscano 2007: 182-186).

Vertov does not oppose the mechanism of montage to the organic body of cinema. He
dissolves this opposition in order to demonstrate how the new cinema transfigures the
physiological and theatrical eye of the habituated spectator into the kino-eye, a sort of
transhuman conduit for a life of sensation that can only be experienced in its vital truth to
the degree that it is machinically constructed and composed (Toscano 2007: 184).

The specific content of images is never mentioned. Life or reality is all images; only the
technique of montage can fully dissect it and reveal its true nature. Vertov is so in thrall to the
technique of his apparatus that he loses all and any distinction between the things of the world at
which he might direct his camera. Or else, gripped by the revolutionary fervour, he sees all
images of the world as equally guilty:

Throughout [Vertovs] texts we can identify three crucial demands, related respectively
to the question of genre, the struggle with the aesthetic of humanism and the relation to
politics: (1) the cinema must die so that the art of cinema may live; (2) the eye must be
emancipated from man; (3) we still need a cinematic October (Toscano 2007: 183).

That there are so many film theoretical efforts to determine the typology of cinematic systems
removed from the content of films reduces the conceptual framework of the cinema to any kind of
foundationalism. It seeks to build a scientific or instrumental base out of the articulations of

86
montage/editing as the conceptual ground of representation leaving the content of films to the
project of specific textual analysis. Its oppositional locus of continuity (as falsity) and discontinuity
(as a truth value for the experiential world) remains tied to a conceptual framework of modernity
that atomises the social body into the private order of the individual (represented character or film
spectator) that is dependent on the dominant metaphysics of the subject. That is, every
articulation (continuity or discontinuity) is organised according to the foundation of the subject
that denies a self-presence of a shared sense of looking. Continuity or discontinuity, or the terms
of montage, configure a binary that becomes the locus for opposing terms of truth and fiction.
Gilles Deleuze is another theorist who proposes that images are elements of the world.
He traces a shift of emphasis around the cut that is explicitly historical. To begin with, in his
monumental taxonomy of cinematic signs, published in two volumes in the 1980s Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image Deleuze gives an account of montage that begins as
variations of the movement-image. This is a general schema for images, sequences, films that
present an indirect image of time (Deleuze 2005a: 56); a formula that places the fragments of an
open linear, temporal continuum (an ontological real) within a rational, organisational whole
based on logical connections of movement. He then identifies a shift from the movement-image to
the time-image, a direct image of time derived from the severing of rational links derived by
movement to irrational links based on subjective or indecisive connections that is historically
commensurate with the effects of World War II. In short, Deleuzes system of signs for the
cinema hinges on the distinction between the allegorical weight given to the cut as an effect or
consequence of montage. He asserted that montage was the principal act of cinema (Deleuze
2005b: 33).
However, in Cinema 2, Deleuze asserts a crisis in the order of the movement-image that
brings forth the time-image. Rather than join in unity, montage now dislocates those same
linkages to open intervals, separations caused by irrational linkages whereby images cannot be
read (or trusted) as being motivated by the pre- or succeeding image. Therefore, according to the
time-image scheme, the outside or obverse of the images has replaced the whole, at the same
time as the interstice or the cut has replaced association (Deleuze 2005b: 206). What is
emphasised as crucial is the cut between two shots precisely because it pertains to the rupture that
distinguishes the rational linkage from the irrational linkage and so ultimately defines the
movement-image from the time-image. What the time-image makes thinkable is what was always

87
present but unrealised in early cinema, an opening on to a state of universal variation (Deleuze
2005a: 83). Montage, whether as rational or irrational linkage, is the means to access the world in
its fundamental disorder, its originary, primal chaos. Jacques Rancire has acknowledged this
chaos as an ontological ground in Deleuzes thesis: The Movement-Image uses specific
cinematographic images to introduce us to the chaotic infinity of the metamorphoses of matter-
light [] The Time-Image shows us, through the operations of the cinematographic art, how
thought deploys a power commensurate with this chaos (Rancire 2006: 113).
In Deleuzes system, the images of cinema are formulated as a natural history of images;
as the mobile-sections of a transcendental ground of difference: the rhizomatic plane of
immanence that is the world. What makes for the type of image is the manner in which Deleuze
attaches these images to history, identifying changes in the typology of images that are
commensurate with the ruptures of historical events. In short, historical rupture creates differing
allegorical readings of the images of cinema before and after the rupture of the Second World
War.
As Jacques Rancire points out, this relation between an historical break that is
commensurate with an aesthetic break speaks essentially as a history of redemption: The
proposed classification of film images is in fact the history of the restitution of world-images to
themselves (Rancire 2006: 111). As Deleuze himself puts it, in language reminiscent of Siegfried
Kracauers secular sacralisation of the real, The link between man and world is broken. [] The
cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link (Deleuze 2005b: 166).
It is here, in the assertion of a cinema of the time-image that is affective and expressive
rather than dependent on the logic of representation, of cause and effect and dialectic synthesis,
that Deleuze most closely anticipates Nancys cinema of interruption, syncopation, patency and
the fragmentary continuity of sense. However, the similarities and significant differences should
be held in reserve since they will be returned to in more detail in chapter four. What is more
crucial for the moment is the primacy Deleuze maintains in an immanent world of becoming that
the cut opens on to as opposed to an excess of symbolic and phenomenal elements within both
image and world as one.
In contrast to Deleuzes efforts to redeem the image and its relationship to the world
though a shift in allegorical reading founded on a cut that is as much historical as aesthetic or
typological, Jacques Rancire maintains the coexistence of contradictory modes of expression

88
within each and every image. Moreover, any intervention of history into the aesthetic forces the
terms of the debate into one of fiction and falsity, or to modes of story against history and the
determining of empirical criteria of truth. Rancire argues that both discourses, of the historical
and the fictional/poetic are a matter of the arrangement of signs and images and in that respect,
are a construction of fictions. Each image becomes the locus of what can be seen and what can be
said.
These are the two criteria that operate as the fundamental tension in what Rancire calls
the distribution of the sensible (Rancire 2004: 85) that functions in all discourses, whether
aesthetic, historical, political, and are particularly amplified as the governing force of the cinema.
The distribution of the sensible formulates the modes by which perceptible facts are identified,
inscribed and constructed aesthetically and therefore, are fundamentally linked to the political and
communitarian (and mythic) functioning of collective understanding and discourse. In particular,
film operates a continuous and fluid tension between the representational regime (after
Aristotle) of events ordered by the logic of reason, narrative, and speech, and the aesthetic
regime (after Romanticism) which abolishes the hierarchical structures of the representational
regime to privilege sensory effect, the immanent meaning of things in themselves, and the act of
making art itself. In short, the representational regime privileges logos over pathos, whilst for the
aesthetic regime it is the reverse.

On the one hand, the very invention of film materially realized the properly aesthetic
definition of art, first elaborated in Schellings System of Transcendental Idealism, as a union
of conscious and unconscious processes. On the other hand, however, film is an art of
fiction that bestows a new youth on the genres, codes, and conventions of representation
that democratic literarity had put into question (Rancire 2004: 5).

The aesthetic regime complicates certain presumptions regarding historical representation. In


Rancires schema the Aristotelian system (from his Poetics) served to counteract the Platonic
suspicion of images and the ends they are intended to serve. The point of poetry is not that of
authentic mimesis but to systematise intelligible structures. Its truth is to be found in the logic of
its causes and effects. This serves to champion poetry (or fiction) over history, which is at the
mercy of the order of empirical events. The aesthetic regime, says Rancire, plunged language

89
into the materiality of the traits by which the historical and social world becomes visible to itself
(Rancere 2004: 36). Art develops the operations of the descriptive, the traces and imprints of the
empirical, the historical, of testimony and experience, as a system of signs: truth came from the
revelation of things in themselves. The poetics of producing stories and history are entangled in
the same arrangement of material signs and images. Narrative simply becomes defined according
to its particular modes: the reactionary restitution of genres, myths, or moral judgements; or
the modernist suspension of meaning in sense experience, existential subjectivity, or formal self-
reflexivity. This latter suspension within the sensuous qualities, or intensities, of things founded in
romanticism identifies a revolutionary silence at the heart of aesthetic expression and the
aesthetic regime.
In Film Fables, Rancire describes this tension between the image and its historical truths
in chapters on Godards Histoire(s) du cinma and Chris Markers The Last Bolshevik (1993), another
film that seeks to provide a revisionist account of the end of history, this time of the Soviet
century, through the life of the film-maker Alexander Medvedkin. Both films operate systems of
retrieval, amassing cinematic, photographic, literary, philosophical and art historical raw material
and recombining, disassociating, singling out, enlarging and freeing it and then reconditioning that
material with audio, text or video effects, to reconstruct and revise the century of cinema, of the
shared community (a communism) of images and image-production, and to isolate the image as
the minimal element of historical truth.
Histoire(s) isolates and extracts still frames and short fragmented sequences to return them
to a natural history of flux, redeeming them from their complicity, as conscripted elements, in an
ideological narrative. It is, Rancire claims, a poetics of pure presence that Godard accuses the
cinema of having betrayed. The cinema failed to be present at the great catastrophes of the middle
of the century; explicitly Auschwitz. Godards voiceover declares, the flame of cinema went out
at Auschwitz. Cinema had failed to be present at the crime of the century because it had given
itself over to the tyranny of industrial and ideological fiction. Of course, as Rancire makes clear,
the validity of such claims is of rather less concern for the films thesis than its provocation. The
claim itself is essential to the films modernist and apocalyptic paradigm of an end to the century
of cinema; a destruction of the Babylon of cinema, a judgement and a prophesy. Through the
montage of conflicting images and texts, multi-layered using the spectacular artifice of electronic
video effects, Rancire finally identifies in Godards task of redemption a fundamental

90
contradiction: that under the initial insistence on the purity of a pure presence is reinstated the
rise of a new spiritualism, a new sacralization of the image and presence through the triumph of
videographic artifice and simulation. In attempting to demonstrate the cinemas betrayal of its
vocation to presence that was its proclaimed historical task, Godard in fact, verifies the inverse
(Rancire 2006: 185).
For Rancire, however, a purity of presence is always already there in the mute images
that the passive apparatus of cinema captures.

A cinematographic fiction is a specific linking of two kinds of sequences: those resolved


according to an Aristotelian representational logic of assembled actions, and those left
unresolved, lyrical sequences that suspend action, subtract themselves from the
imperative of meaning, and offer a simple view of life in all its idiocy and all its brute
existence, without reason (in Garneau and Cisneros 2004: 119).

The real, a sense of presence, is not something that needs to be extracted and re-written by the
voice. In calling for the redemption of the raw image Godard is missing the fact that the excess of
signification that always inhabits the cinematic image was already there, already of its moment.
Likewise, Markers aim is similarly a re-writing of history through the reinscription of the
tissue-fragments of its historical images that are memorial images, since Markers long-standing
assertion has been that collective memory is the sum of a cultures images of itself. The Last
Bolshevik narrates the life of Soviet film-maker Alexander Medvedkin, which, in Markers
narrative, runs in uncanny parallel with the Soviet century. Medvedkins life moves from
revolutionary films, through Stalinist propaganda, to a life dwindling and struggling to rediscover
his earlier recognition, to an eventual death on the eve of Perestroika. Marker surrounds this
biography with a range of archive images from the Soviet century: works by Medvedkins
contemporaries, early cinema newsreel and modern electronic news-gathering. He then re-writes
these images and their meanings by instigating a didactic voice-over that reminds and insists on the
meaning of images and their shadows and the duties of memory to remind us not to trust what we
see. However, Marker appears less sceptical about trusting what we hear.
As Rancire points out, Marker merely traps himself within the problem of
documentary images those images of cinematic origin that comprise a referential real and an

91
heterogeneity of source material (Rancire 2006: 159). Cinema retrospection then, is free to
play around with the consonance and dissonance between narrative voices, or with the series of
period images, each with a different provenance and signifying power. It can join the power of the
impression, the power of speech born from the meeting of the mutism of the machine and the
silence of things, to the power of montage, in the broad, non-technical sense of the term, as that
which constructs a story and a meaning by its self-proclaimed right to combine meanings freely, to
re-view images, to arrange them differently, and to diminish or increase their capacity for
expression and for generating meaning (Rancire 2006: 161).
Both Histoire(s) du cinma and The Last Bolshevik, through their respective obsessions with
the collective stories and memories of a Soviet century that is also a cinematic century, in the end
betray the dilemma of a cinematic preoccupation with the disassembling and reassembling logic of
montage as the essential site of meaning. Theirs is a foundation grounded on the shattering and
reconstituting of signs; a contradictory nostalgia for image as truth at the very same time as such a
truth is declared impossible.
Jacques Rancire, however, seeks to redress the balance from a preoccupation with the
typological and foundational ground of montage to a privileging of the cinematic image that always
already contains the contradictory means to disrupt its organisation. Michle Garneau summarises
the tension at work in every image and in the notion of the thwarted fable by which Rancire
seeks to characterise the cinema:

The experience of visibility so pivotal to film does not develop in opposition to its
discursive and narrative structure, but because of it, in contradiction with it, by
countering it. The two powers share their potentials within a relationship that is both
collaborative and conflictual. Only when considered conjointly, Rancire maintains, can
we grasp the conflict now latent, now exploding with violence that gives the cinema
its force. This force of contradiction derives from the contrast between the closure of
meaning and the openness to the visible (Garneau 2004: 110).

The tension between the closure of meaning and the openness of the visible is taken to its extreme
in one further example put forward by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. He has remarked
that the cinema could be made on the basis of images from cinema (Agamben 1996: 70). Whilst

92
this may only appear to typify the post-modern cult of pastiche and irony, the continuation of
classical genre and narrative or character archetypes, or more particularly, their resurgence in
ever more technically spectacular forms, has for Agamben a distinct formula positioned in direct
opposition to the forms of spectacle that was the central critique of Situationism. Specifically,
Agamben comments on Guy Debords rearrangement of the images of mass culture advertising,
fiction, newsreel, and so on in his film In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni (1979); a technique
of restitution and reinterpretation that pre-empts both Histoire(s) and The Last Bolshevik.
According to Agamben, Debord is drawn to the cinema precisely because of the historical
character of its images. He claims, following Deleuzes semiotics of image-movements that the
image in cinema and not only in cinema, but in modern times generally is no longer something
immobile. It is not an archetype, nor is it something outside history: rather, it is a cut that is itself
mobile, an image-movement, charged with a dynamic tension. This is Benjamins dialectical
image, conceived in Agambens interpretation, as a distinct element of historical experience.
Historical experience is obtained by the image, and the images themselves are charged with
history (Agamben 1996: 69). However, this is a history conditioned by Benjamins messianic
formulation; not merely the fragments of a chronological history but loaded with the
eschatological couplet of judgement and salvation; of the redemption of the image from the
catastrophe of historical narrative. Such is the rupture of montage.
Agamben argues that montage is the specific character of the cinema, and the
transcendental conditions of montage are repetition and stoppage (Agamben 1996: 70).
Repetition, in the lengthy philosophical tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and
Deleuze, does not express the return of the same but the restoration of the possibility of what
was, or the re-inscription of memory into history as the possibility of thinking anew. At the same
time, stoppage (again following Benjamin) is the revolutionary interruption or the power to
interrupt. It is stoppage that makes the cinema closer to the ideal of poetry than the narrative of
prose to which plot-driven classical cinema is preferentially compared. Stoppage, in the poem,
presents a disjunction between sound and meaning a phrase borrowed from Paul Valry: the
poem, a prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning (Agamben 1996: 70). Debords
technique, then, should be seen in the same manner, as a prolonged hesitation between image
and meaning in which stoppage wrenches the image away from its narrative sense to be exhibited
in and for itself. The messianic task that Agamben attributes to Debords film, is the capacity to

93
de-create the real and take the image towards imagelessness, or to present the image as image,
somehow stripped of its pre-determined signifying mode, leaving it signifying nothing except the
fact that it is in the process of signifying (Agamben 1996: 71 italics in original). Unlike Godard and
Marker, Debord does not pronounce upon the images he extracts. Instead, he returns them to the
process of signifying, which is reiterated by, and in fact depends upon, their suspension in
imminence as effected by the palindromic title and the structure that effects a repeat, as a constant
circulation of incomplete images. They withdraw meaning at the same time as they initiate and
process it.
The history of the theory of montage is one in which the technique of montage itself takes
on a philosophical and essentially redemptive character. Since acquiring a strategic function of
narration or dialectics, after the initial accumulation of shots in an act of showing during the
pre-narrative era, montage is acquired as a philosophical or political method. Moreover, this
method is then integrated into a wider philosophical scepticism that Alberto Toscano describes, in
which the striving for integration and synthesis becomes a separation in the wake of the Second
World War. Here, claims Toscano, philosophy abdicates its role as an arbiter of transcendent
truths and relocates itself in the mistrust of the images of the world, of representation and of
meanings derived from things. This is the crisis of philosophys critique of representation (Toscano
2007: 181 italics in original).

We could almost say that it was by registering the ambient failure of traditional principles
of ordering (somewhat hastily collected under this rubric of representation), and in trying
to fashion new instruments of measurement and integration, that philosophy found itself
obliged to aggravate its own crisis, and to do so by breathing a strange new life into that
most (late) scholastic of terms, ontology (Toscano 2007: 181).

Montage as an essentially conceptual practice is then dependent on a principle of representation


and either its synthesis or its disruption. However, a movement towards an ontological relation
something that Jean-Luc Nancy proposes when he configures each cinematic shot as a fragment of
sense; an interrupting, syncopating contact with the world that is itself part of an existence
based on discontinuous experience reclaims for cinema a relation with the world rather than
simply with a currency of images or representations. Nancys interruption of myths, similar in

94
terms to Rancires thwarted fable and Agambens process of signifying, reclaims the shot, rather
than the cut, as the primary aspect of cinematic practice: in effect, the act of looking prior to the
act of judging.
In one final comment, Rancire raises the question that should the cinematic image need
to be redeemed then it must have lost something, a perceptive power that must be returned to it
(Rancire 2006: 111). It is in this final question, poised at the threshold of the possibility, or
otherwise, of a redemptive practice for the cinema, that we turn to Nancys more specific relation
between world, sense, the fragment and the cinema. In The Sense of the World, he argues that
sense emerges at the site where its traditional concepts are exhausted and all formulae for
replacement are deemed ineffective or, worse, totalitarian. Poised between myth and nihilism,
or the absolute and the abyss of nothingness sense emerges in fragments. He is adamant,
however, that fragmentation must not succumb to an absolution, or nihilism, of the dialectical or
causal as it has in its modernist form in existence since Romanticism (Nancy 1997: 124).
Instead, as Jeffrey Librett outlines in his introduction, the aesthetics of fragmentation has
remained excessively bound up with an absolute totality of which each fragmentary and relative
work has functioned, in its very autonomy, as a synecdochic mirror image (in Nancy 1997: xvii)
a point we might extend to the open-ended structures of modernist cinema (aside from the
closed structures of classical narrative) that articulate their fragmentary, sequential narratives as
either self-reflexive meditations on the operation of image production or the existential reification
of the subject.
Nancys response is to argue for a continuation of fragmentation that initiates not
conceptual ends but an endlessly incomplete relation of parts brought into presence:

The fractality with which we will have to do from this point on and which
fragmentation also announced is quite different. Instead of the ambiguous end of the
fragment, it is a matter of the fraying of the edges of its trace [son frayage]. It is a matter of
the frayed access [laccs fray] to a presentation, to a coming into presence and by way
of this coming into presence. [] What makes up world and sense can no longer be
determined as a given, accomplished, finished presence but is intermingled with the
coming, the in-finity of a coming into presence, or of an e-venire (Nancy 1997: 126).

95
This fractality provokes the question of what remains when absolute and relative, myth and
nihilism, the whole or the fragment have been exhausted.

The event is not a taking-place: it is the incommensurability of coming to all taking-


place, the incommensurability of spacing and fraying [frayage] to all space disposed in the
present of a presentation (Nancy 1997: 126).

Despite the elusiveness of Nancys phrasing, we might begin to locate this process of spacing and
fraying within the reoriented view of the films set out here. In each case, they do not seek to
encapsulate the taking-place of any event or condition. In a further sense, the historical aspect of
montage that has appeared consistently in theoretical discourse is reconfigured as Nancy says of
historicism qua metaphysics away from the movement towards completion, or a retrospective
analysis, and towards the exhaustion of the possibility of defining an end point. As examples, both
The Asthenic Syndrome and Palms, by virtue of their responses to the immediacy of the socio-political
conditions within which they were produced, realise only the assemblage of elements
consequentially partial and incomplete: selected traces of their milieu. Elephant and Last Days, each
recall a single event, but not through the causality of what took place but as the overlapping,
shifting moments that testify to the dissipation of reasons for each violent event. Ulrich Seidls
Import Export, contains at its centre a perpetual taking-place that of the existent border between
Austria and Slovakia to present simply the fraying of its conceptual and symbolic status.
Furthermore, the taking-place of this fragmentation relates between films, from one to the
other, as a persistent refusal of completeness. The form in which this presentation and
incompleteness relates to the possibility of redemption aesthetic or conceptual requires a
realignment of the terms of the real.

96
CHAPTER 4

Cinematic Realism and the Mystery of Redemption

Where the films of Godard and Marker seek to redeem the images of the past with a retrospective
truth via the use of montage, a consistent theme throughout the history of film theory has sought
to locate images of truth in the act of filming. It is a theme that circulates around the contingency
and separation of the fictional and the real, the predetermined and the revelatory. Key theorists of
post-war cinematic realism such as Andr Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer claimed a totalising,
unifying real world as the ground of all fictions. Subsequent theorists, notably Paul Schrader and
Gilles Deleuze, reconfigured the real into a metaphysics of experience described as either
transcendental or immanent respectively, but remained within a formula for reinstating a belief
in the mystery of the world by opposing an instrumental rationality of images and its logic of
representation.
Central to these theories remained a sense of defilement of the real in modernity and a
separation of a pure experience from that which is reified in the tainted mythologies of
commodified fiction. It is this purity of the real that had to be redeemed, the perceptual
authenticity that, as Rancire says, has been lost and must be returned. These are the redemptive,
even utopian, aspects of the real in modernity. Moreover, these theories continue to espouse the
separation between a materialist, essentialist or immanent real and its subjective, perceptual
viewer.
This chapter aims to follow this thread, paying particular attention to Bazin, Kracauer,
Schrader and Deleuze, in order to locate the real within this modernist configuration of an
existential and phenomenological experience. The purpose of this background is to set the terms
within and against which Jean-Luc Nancys particular kind of realism can be located, in particular
what Ian James calls Nancys post-phenomenological (James 2006: 219) expression of sense.
As already sketched out in Chapter Two, Nancys description of sense provides a formula for a
realism and an experience of the world that retains a relationship of the material and the ideative,
the physical and the spiritual, the transcendental and the empirical through the exposure of
discontinuous fragments of sense. The artwork, or specifically the shots within a film as well as
film as a whole, offers fragments of and exposures to the world as it is sensed. The symbols of

97
established meanings and the excesses and suspensions of that meaning together form a
transimmanent sense. The images of the world are then presented as discontinuous fragments
simultaneously revealing and withdrawing meaning rather than conforming or self-reflexively
disrupting traditional orders of representation. Where representation always ultimately identifies
a destination or a limit to meaning, an exposure to fragments of sense presents the limit
situation of a real, or world, as it is taking place (Nancy 1993: 2).

(i) Wim Wenders, Andr Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer: the lost real

The crux of traditional cinematic realism opposes the contingency of the real and its necessary
disruption of, or intervention within, the fictive, with the fictive, itself, as a heightened
recognition of the real world. The former, built on the possibilities of duration and immersion,
drives the theories of Bazin and Kracauer; the latter, paying greater attention to the disruptions
and gaps within duration, is focused on Schrader and Deleuze. Both aspects present themselves in
an exchange that takes place between Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog in Wenders 1983 film,
Tokyo-Ga, his meditation on the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu and the possibility of finding the
essence of Ozus films within the radically altered fabric of modern Tokyo. The two directors of
New German Cinema lament the loss of pure images in a world overwhelmed by commodifying
image production. Both, in their own ways, express a desire to reconnect with images drawn from
the real world to counteract the unfaithful representations of commercial fiction. In his film
narration, Wenders contrasts the forgery of emotion he finds in the images of an in-flight movie
with the view from the aeroplane window: If only it were possible to film like that [] the way
you sometimes open your eyes. Just looking, not trying to prove anything (Wenders 1991: 61).
Ultimately, Wenders proclaims the possibility of locating a real or pure image in the
fragments of the quotidian or everyday events of the city, in fleeting glimpses of eternal human
gestures or the atmospherics of light and shade that transcend the historical ravages of Tokyos
hyper-modernisation. By contrast, Herzog is adamant that the simple truth is that there arent
many images around now (in Wenders 1991: 64). Pure images require extreme measures; a
desire for something like an originary moment in which the pure image is discovered in the
absolutely prime, the never before witnessed. For Herzog it is a matter of bearing witness to the
unwitnessed. He proclaims it necessary to enter war zones, climb mountains or visit the depths of

98
the oceans or outer space: a wager that, to some extent, he fulfilled in later works such as Lessons
of Darkness (1992) and The Wild Blue Yonder (2005). A look from Wenders perspective will locate
the terms for a closer examination of Bazin and Kracauer; whilst Herzogs formula for an ecstatic
truth (in Cronin 2002: 301) will open up discussion of Schrader and Deleuze.
In Tokyo-Ga Wenders speculates on an ambiguous relation with reality in the cinema
suggesting that reality is already corrupted on account of the intervention of an inevitable
human subjectivity, and yet he insists that there must still be a reality (Wenders 1991: 63). Some
years later, in Until the End of the World (1991), Wenders conceptually suggests that the images of
the subconscious, extracted by science directly from the brain, would be like a sickness, a toxic
experience cut loose from external reality. In Tokyo-Ga, he emphasises a gulf between the cinema
and life such that its become a rarity in todays cinema for [] moments of truth to take place,
for people and things to show themselves as they are (Wenders 1991: 63); though in the end he
claims to find it in the sight of an intransigent young boy on the platform of the Tokyo metro
being dragged along by his overburdened mother: a fleeting glimpse of the quotidian passage of
everyday Tokyo that recalls the stubborn, rebellious children common to Ozus films, yet more
so, the reality of lifes authenticity that he believes such images in Ozus films ultimately convey.
Wenderss presentation of reality circulates continuously around the contingent as it may or may
not enter the narrative space of the cinema. These external fragments of uncontrolled,
undisciplined reality that puncture the surface reality of any filmed narrative are the substance of
a truth and a purity of image that retains a contact between the cinema and the world, or life.
Catherine Russell has argued that this question, of the impossible reconciliation of the
images of reality and those of cinematic narrative, has formed the crux of Wenderss cinema: that
a cinematic realism that lies outside of psychological narrative keeps alive the possibility of a realist
cinema free of narrative constraints (Russell 1995: 94). Wenders codified a three-stage typology
of images that he called the grammatical, the profound and the found. The grammatical are
those images necessary for the articulation of narrative, those that orchestrate action and reaction
and are the currency of all films. The profound are those images personal to Wenders, images of
locations, events, gestures witnessed and consigned to memory for re-use and re-formulation in a
film. The found are those images discovered or chanced upon whilst shooting, such as locations
or the atmospherics or the gestures or effects of actors or backgrounds that only make themselves
apparent in post-production (in Russell 1995: 93).

99
Each of these modes is exemplified in the directors 1982 film, The State of Things. The
film is structured in three distinct parts: the first, a short sequence from a post-apocalyptic science
fiction story replete with the cinematic genres recognisable tropes: a desert landscape,
technological obsession, family trauma and heroic self-sacrifice. The second part suspends this
fiction as the genre film is forced to halt production for financial reasons and, thereafter, the film
proceeds as an observational document of the cast and crew quite literally killing time eating,
sleeping, bathing and waiting for the production to restart. In the third and final section, the
overarching plot is restored as the fictional director returns to Los Angeles in search of the films
errant producer, who, in a restoration of genre, is on the run from loan sharks. The director and
producer embark on a dialogue that argues the dichotomy between images of life and those of
dramatic fiction, littered with references to film noir, and conceptually configured as an opposition
of a European auteur and a Hollywood producer. Finally both men are shot dead by unseen
assailants. The final images of the film are those from the directors Super-8 camera continuing to
depict its dislocated point-of-view of the empty car park where it and the director have fallen.
In Russells analysis, the directors death is the apotheosis of the grammatical image
(Russell 1995: 103), locked into the motif of death that is both central and inevitable in the wider
context of post-war modernist cinema. Death is the only means to end any narrative based on
life, on an existential experience of being-towards-death as the conceptual ground formulated in
opposition to the divine grace of classical plot mechanics that forever bestow the happy or
just ending. Thereafter, the coda of the continuous point-of-view from the Super-8 camera,
freed from the eye of its now dead director, belies the contradiction at the heart of Wenderss
found image. It is within this final sequence, rather than in the lengthy, waiting segment, that
the tensions and contradictions of Wenderss position are most acutely located. When the camera
falls from the murdered directors grasp it continues to record as if it were a found image, a
fragment of the reality of the empty car park, no longer sutured to the point-of-view of the dead
director, a character in a fiction, but still that of the living director: Wenders himself. The
redemption of the real as found fragment of the rolling camera offers an image of a reality (just
as the fictional director has been seen to argue for) freed from the determinations of its
grammatical function: the real recuperated by the continuation beyond the death of the filming
subject (Russell 1995: 101). However, the very fact that it must be re-inscribed into a narrative of
death undermines the lengthy middle section of the film in which a more radically abstracted

100
mortality is played out as a document of the mere passing of time. The final segment reiterates the
problem that says that any realism must inevitably be aligned with subjectivity: consciousness is
privileged over empirical reality (Russell 1995: 101). In the end, argues Russell, Wenderss
attempts to survive the death-drive of narrative with the found image of a reality beyond
consciousness betrays a kind of romanticism: he can only do so by insisting on the status of the
image as a subjective phenomenon, and the very substance of artistic vision (Russell 1995: 102).
More broadly, Russell incorporates Wenders into the theme of a European post-war
modernism, similarly expressed by both Godard and Deleuze, and defined in the binary of an
American-European opposition. Moreover, this theme circulates around the motif of mortality as
a violent means of condemning closure as a narrative and historical event (Russell 1995: 3).
Given over to self-reflexivity, it becomes an ironic representation; where once film theory was
configured on a binary opposition of realism and illusion, in modernity realist discourse []
knows itself to be dead. It can no longer deny its status as mechanical reproduction, but neither
can it abandon the real of photographic indexicality (Russell 1995: 15). Russell argues that post-
war modernism is reliant on the contingency implicit in a form of documentary realism (Russell
1995: 97, original in italics) with its essential, existential sense of the loss of meaning. Wenders is
compared to Andr Bazin, for whom also, mortality and representation are the means by which
consciousness is at once threatened and preserved in its ideal status as identity the viewing
subject as active participant able to redeem the image through existential reflection. Likewise,
Godard, allied with Walter Benjamin, also seeks a redemptive aspect in the indexical real that
carries with it the singularity of historical experience that is a critique of loss, recovery, and
return (Russell 1995: 13). A realist ontology of the cinema, such as Wenders, proposes a ground
from which the viewing subject can formulate thought, concept, or even in the religiously
inflected terms used by Andr Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, spirituality. In each case, a
phenomenological influence fixes the real as duration and contingency in opposition to a fictive
idealism; it represents a real that breaks the surface or ruptures the fictive to authenticate a unity
of being (or in Deleuzes case, a flux of becoming, as will be seen). However, in each case, this
unity opposes the instrumental effects of modernity that gives over to the modernist perpetuation
of the state of death, loss or ruin and therefore, represents the limit or the destination of meaning
against which the subject is necessarily defined.

101
In two studies, European Film Theory and Cinema: An Introduction (2001) and Realist Film
Theory and Cinema: The Nineteenth-century Lukcsian and Intuitionist Realist and Modernist Tradition
(2006), Ian Aitken has sought to place cinematic realism within the broader historical context of
artistic and literary realism and its relation to modernity. He identifies the link between the
phenomenologically realist theories of Bazin and Kracauer and modernity as one of confrontation:
they both sought to challenge the prevailing forces of instrumental rationality, a term developed
by Max Weber and used in pervasive and universal terms by Adorno and Horkheimer. Aitken
notes that whilst other realist theorists of the first half of the twentieth century, notably John
Grierson and Georg Lukcs, are identified with a more idealist and politically didactic sentiment,
Bazin and Kracauer stand out for their phenomenological and ontological arguments.
Aitken traces Bazins early philosophical influences to theorists of the French Catholic
existentialist persuasion, in particular Emmanuel Mounier who attempted to provide the more
nihilistic aspects of existentialism found in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger with an
optimistic spin drawn from theological sources (Aitken 2006: 173). Likewise, the protestant
literary and film critic Roger Leenhardt is also cited by Aitken as a key influence on Bazin. He was
another theorist who made regular recourse to the Christian view of humanity as essentially
fallen and therefore in need of redemption in the context of a dehumanising, depersonalising,
that is modernising, world. Aitken points to Bazins concerns with the depersonalisation of
modern experience and argues these are reminiscent of themes expressed by Henri Bergson,
whose turn of the century theories placed duration at the core of the human condition (Aitken
2006: 173) but in a manner that differed from that of the principle phenomenologist of the time,
Edmund Husserl. Aitken suggests that for the latter it was the immediate experience of the life-
world (the Lebenswelt) that provided the prerequisite for the human being to evolve as subjects.
For Bergson, a greater degree of human intentionality was immediately necessary to locate the
human being in the midst of the endless flux of matter that constituted the world what he
identified as instinct (Aitken 2006: 174). Standing in the way of lan vital the ever-evolving
flux of all life that includes within it human consciousness was modernity, with its scientific
compartmentalisation of this flux and its hegemonic tendency to disrupt, halt and eliminate
duration in favour of distinct and quantifiable units (Aitken 2006: 175). The consequence of this
was that human experience lost its fundamental relationship with duration and flux and with a
suprarational reflection that is replaced by an abstracted form of experience.

102
The combination of these factors leads Bazin, in his essay The Ontology of the
Photographic Image (1945), to put forward the thesis that human existence is caught within a
temporal experience of decay, which returns in the form of the mummy complex, the
apparently constant human need to preserve the human being against the inevitability of death
whether through the means of ritual, religion, art, or technology.
However, Bazin is highly critical of a nave form for realism that simply equates the image
with a mirror reflection or rendering of reality: this resemblance complex is in fact the
original sin of Western art (Bazin 1971a: 13). The mummy complex is also recognised as an
artificial construct in its bid to resist the passage of time and decay. In this respect, Bazin adopts
some of the more pessimistic views of the existentialist tradition. It is through the cinema that he
attempts to grasp the more optimistic aspects, through the relationship between the unified
fragments of cinematic shots and the subjective position of the spectator, recognising, not the
singular, distinct sections of a constructivist montage with its instrumental grammar, but (through
the recognition of the flow dure with all its indeterminacy) the means to realise the
experience of of life as successiveness without distinction (Bazin 1971a: 9).
Bazin remains focused on a totality of experience in the cinematic image, an experience
that transcends the individual parts and the logical articulation of successive cause and effect. Such
a limited structure of articulation points to the limits and limitations of a fractured human
condition. Bazin is searching for an impression that is closer to the existential desire for a unifying
gathering of experience into a whole. Cinema is best placed to achieve this, not through the
articulation of individual units of a pre-determined world and events but through, firstly, the
photographic reproduction of an always already recognisable external reality, and, secondly, the
sequential images of duration that can present an integrated flow that, also, always already links
past, present and future.
It was this essentially totalising field of vision, with its apparent implication of a
transcendental subject as the root of vision, that lay at the heart of the structuralist and semiotic
criticism of Bazin in the 1970s. Bazins theories retain this link between the indexical cinematic
image and a meaningful, unified reality. Jean Mitry objected that the cameras automatic
registration of a given reality does not necessarily provide for an objective and impartial image of
that reality (in Bazin 1971a: 6), but Bazins thesis was never quite so simple. Crucial to his
argument was the role of the spectator as a subject incorporated into the cinematic text as active

103
agent, filling in gaps and integrating an existential impression of totality through the continuous
spans of temporality set down in the passage of the films narrative. Bazinian cinematic realism
expresses a faith in forms that remain close to the perceptual experience of the world. It proclaims
the perceptual experience of the cinema to resemble the existential experience of the spectators
life-experience. Such familiarity with the image on the screen enables the spectators to feel an
analogous relation to experienced reality. It gives scope for them to seek a totality of experience
from the fractured, fragmented experience of the sequential scenes as free agents, not recipients
of a pre-determined representation structured by the film. In this respect, Bazins formula is
heavily dependent on the indeterminacy and transience of a realistic physical setting a feature
that led him to embrace the Italian Neo-Realists with such enthusiasm. However, familiarity is
only part of the equation. When writing of Neo-Realism Bazin is prepared to take this relation
beyond the empirical and to imbue this familiarity with a religiosity, using terms such as faith,
love and grace (Bazin 1971b).
A key distinction between the cinematic realism of Bazin and that of Siegfried Kracauer
concerns a films present context. For Bazin, the cinematic totality rests on the relationship
between the films conceptual diegesis its characterisation, action, location, visualisation and
the peripheral visual data which are on hand in the scene; that is the scope of coincidental,
momentarily present elements that creep into the scene, a kind of atmospherics of the moment a
perspective echoed by Wenders. Kracauer, by contrast, was inclined to a cinematic totality that
consisted in the successive interrelations of a films content with references to elements of the
world existing beyond that content (Kracauer 1970: 303).
Bazins enthusiasm for the indeterminate within the frame, for the intersection of drama
flooded by worldly elements exterior to that drama, was epitomised in the stylistic importance
given to the lengthy sequence shot over the short, fragmentary montage sequence exemplified by
the controlling methodology of Soviet montage. Duration becomes central to the shot, providing
for the contemplative and immersive involvement of the spectator.
Overall, Bazin seeks to transcend the problems that modernity, through its instrumental
rationality and functional accounting, places on the broader existential and phenomenological
nature of human experience. This attempt to transcend leads him to maintain certain metaphysical
points of reference and fall back into forms of theological rhetoric. He writes of Robert Bressons
Diary of a Country Priest (1950):

104
probably for the first time, the cinema gives us a film in which the only genuine incidents,
the only perceptible movements are those of the life of the spirit. Not only that, it also
offers us a new dramatic form, that is specifically religious or better still, specifically
theological; a phenomenology of salvation and grace (Bazin 1971a: 182).

The elevation of non-dramatic incidents, drawn from a familiarity with the empirical world and
bound with the passage of perceptible movements, eschews psychological analysis. The symbolic
and the real come together analogous to Christs stations of the cross providing theological
values but defying explanation (Bazin 1971a: 135).
In seeking out a totality to unify the existential and phenomenological world opened up to
the camera Bazin is forced to describe what is presented in ultimately onto-theological terms.
Siegfried Kracauer, however, attempted to locate the transcendent or totalising possibility of
cinematic realism in a purely secular phenomenological Lebenswelt.
Kracauer saw in the cinema the possibility of a realism that could expose the limitations
and disenchantment of modernity. He developed the terms of abstraction, distraction and
disenchantment from the sociological theories of Max Weber, who argued that disenchantment
was the result of the diminishing of metaphysical or utopian values in modernity due to its
instrumental systems of management controlled by capitals ruling structures. Kracauer, likewise,
argued that abstraction results when the immediate experience of the physical environment as a
whole is depleted and turned into abstract commodity values, and distraction follows because
cultural experience lacks any genuine substance and therefore leads to a distracted form of
spectatorship and consumption (Aitken 2006: 154).
Along with Weber Kracauer was influenced by Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. He
argued that in modernity a form of lawless freedom permeates aesthetic practice, debasing
Kants original view that the imagination should be integrally related to a critical understanding.
He also endorsed Husserls phenomenological account of the life-world, or Lebenswelt, which
stressed the world of immediate subjective experience (a complexity of satisfactions, discords,
wants and pursuits which often lie below the conceptual and the conscious, Aitken 2006: 157).
To counter the alienation caused by such disenchantment, Kracauer developed a realist aesthetic
under the terms of the Redemption of Physical Reality, in which he saw the possibility of

105
bringing the individual into closer proximity with the realities of the physical world that had been
obscured by the mass ornamentation of modernity (Kracauer 1970: 300).
His belief was that the means to fully grasp the experience of the real, to appreciate a
sense of the human condition outside of the influence of instrumental rationality, could not be
fully achieved. Access to the experience of a physical, empirical Lebenswelt the sphere of
immediate perceptual experience was denied by that influence. Husserls phenomenological
Lebenswelt combined a subjective relativity with an always already existing communality (a being-
with-others), and must be experienced as a totality that is perceived largely through intuition. In
simplified terms, Husserl sought to give greater weight to the evidence of experience than to the
products of abstract forms of conceptual enquiry. This Kracauer adopts as the means to escape
from the limitations of modernitys reductive rationality through the immediate experience of the
world in phenomenological terms. This transcendence leads Kracauer to use the indeterminate
term redemption. It is worth recalling the emphasis Stephen Mulhall gives to this word,
however: it does not imply a moral or technical perfection, or a systematic or reasoned
improvement, but remains enigmatic. It need not be founded on the attainability of some mystical
or divine intervention (salvation or grace) but through the recognition that such a condition is
indeed necessary. Such is the sense by which Kracauer asserts redemption, inspired by a revelatory
awareness achievable through close scrutiny of physical conditions and a resistance to rationalising
frameworks. Nevertheless, his recourse to the elusive terminology of redemption, belief and
spiritual life gained through a secular appropriation of the theological that is then collapsed into a
phenomenological life-world of immediate experience remains difficult to qualify; its terms are
dependent on an implied access to an undefined spiritual rather than corporeal life (Kracauer
1970: xi). He returns to origins, citing the films of the Lumire Company: a jumble of transient,
forever dissolving patterns accessible only to the camera (Kracauer 1970: 81). Nevertheless, his
realism is not that of a nave verisimilitude, but of a phenomenological recognition that allows for,
and circulates around, a greater degree of exposure to the flow of material life (Kracauer 1970:
300) that presents a greater autonomy than the determined and determining factors of either a
classically realist narrative or a heavily symbolist formalism. Kracauer is determined to resist films
that present themselves as self-contained entities in the sense of presenting an aesthetic whole.
Films should contain diegetic gaps within them.

106
Kracauer did not seek to replace existing film theories with a new model but to
accentuate the importance of material evidence (Kracauer 1970: 304). Gertrud Koch neatly
summarises the overall theory:

Kracauers theory of film can be subdivided analytically into three components or areas,
namely a sensualist aesthetics (adumbrated by means of an analytic of the spectator), a
philosophy of the real based on an existential ontology (whereby existence is taken as the
domain of referential objects), and a redemptive figure based on an aesthetics of
reconciliation (which Kracauer roots in the specifics of film as a medium) (Koch 2000:
106).

In a form that bears similarity with Wenders profound image that which is acknowledged and
returned Koch describes Kracauers use of the Medusa myth in reference to the confrontation of
historys atrocities: we do not, and cannot, see actual horrors because they paralyze us with
blinding fear; and [] we shall know what they look like only by watching images of them which
reproduce their true appearance (Kracauer 1970: 305). In the end, though, Kracauers form of
redemption is overly dependent on a visual primacy and the need for the image to maintain a
concrete relation to the extant object. As such, it is destined to failure with respect to any event
that fails to leave a visual mnemonic trace (Koch 2000: 113).
For both Bazin and Kracauer, the real could be the means to access something elusively
spiritual. Kracauer writes in the preface to Theory of Film:

Perhaps the way today leads from, and through, the corporeal to the spiritual? And
perhaps the cinema helps us to move from below to above? It is indeed my contention
that film, our contemporary, has a definite bearing on the era into which it is born; that it
meets our innermost needs precisely by exposing for the first time, as it were outer
reality and thus deepening, in Gabriel Marcels words, our relation to this Earth which is
our habitat (Kracauer 1970, xi).

At the same time, this statement betrays an overly totalising formula for the real, and for the
cinema, one that is less engaged with content than a particular approach to mise-en-scne and a

107
direct link to the contingent and the everyday details of existence. It is equally reliant on a visual
reality for which it is difficult to relate those aspects of experience such as might be described as
evil or sinful that are without recourse to acts. In the end Kracauer relies as Wim Wenders
continued to on a unified real world based on essential truths that redeems an existential life
experience through the restitution or recognition of a primordial, pre-symbolic state.

(ii) Werner Herzog, Paul Schrader, Gilles Deleuze: the mysterious real

In contrast to the redeeming characteristics of a unified and totalising real world behind the
fiction, Werner Herzog argues for a pure image that speaks first and foremost of an ecstatic
truth, a truth that is mysterious and elusive (in Cronin 2002: 301). Despite Herzogs claim that
such an ecstatic truth must be accessed through poetic means, by fabrication and imagination
and stylization (in Cronin 2002: 301), his relationship to the real is crucial, and crucially different
from that of Wenders and those who seek to find the pure image in the singular, contingent
moment that breaks the surface of a fictive narration. Herzog has played out this confusion in a
consistent body of work that stretches the traditional boundaries between documentary and
fiction. This notorious ambiguity is reflected in key works such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
and Fitzcarraldo (1982) and even more so in those documentary films that bear witness to the
extremities of their filming situations, notably La Soufrire (1976), Lessons of Darkness (1992) and
The Wild Blue Yonder (2005).
In Lessons of Darkness, images of the burning oil fields of Kuwait in the immediate aftermath
of the First Gulf War are narrated as the imaginary visitation by an alien race to a post-apocalyptic
Earth, replete with text from the Biblical Revelations. Similarly, The Wild Blue Yonder re-imagines
scientific imagery filmed both in outer space and from beneath the polar ice caps as the images of
an alien races failed attempts to establish their civilisation on Earth. Just as Herzog had conflated
the images of mirages in the desert with a Mayan creation myth in Fata Morgana (1970), so he
immerses the images of the world in the images of the cosmic, the mythic, the sacred,
rhetorically hauling the real as photographically evidenced into a dialogue with the concept of
the sublime. Herzogs films continually present the idea of the immense, the transcendent, the
cosmic something like the sheer abyss of the natural world and combine it with an imagery
staked in the unique but factual, an act of witnessing that seeks to refute all logical, reasonable

108
modes of exposition. The hallucinatory delusions of transcendence and visionary hubris, the
constant turning on myths of creation and apocalyptic rebirth, continually fail to match the
sublimity of bare life, the bare evidence, of the images of an existent world. Rather than a
romantic sublime, aimed at an expression of the infinite, Herzogs is closer to the sublime or
mysterious evoked by the presentation of the sheer inability to comprehend beyond looking.
This limit situation of the mysterious or the ineffable points us in the direction of Paul
Schrader and Gilles Deleuze, two later theorists who developed aspects of the real in relation to
the effects of the transcendent and the immanent.
Paul Schrader proposed a transcendental style, detectable through certain formal
characteristics configured around the rupture of a realist mode of address to express the
transcendent or effects beyond normal sense experience (Schrader 1972: 5). He distils this
transcendental style into the relation between a realist representation, what he calls an
everydayness formed from recognisable and unexceptional moments of recognisable reality, and
moments of disparity that inexplicably rupture this prosaic normality (Schrader 1972: 160).
Schrader begins by considering the contentious development of the term transcendent as
it has been applied both theologically and to works of art, arguing that since art works are human
works they cannot inform about the transcendent, they can only be expressive of it. Such terms
then lead directly to the examples of the films of Ozu and Robert Bresson that link the
inexplicable and the spiritual to the real of what is readily and necessarily apparent: The proper
function of transcendental art is, therefore, to express the Holy itself (the Transcendent), and not
to express or illustrate holy feelings (Schrader 1972: 7). The style is prefigured on the possibility
of presenting a spiritual truth by combining the look of an objective image drawn from the world
against another without recourse to logical, rational or psychological terms. There is a kind of
asceticism at work in such a formula: the transcendent is glimpsed through the distillation of
experience, of action and reaction, into minimal terms. Detailing camerawork, editing and
performance, Schrader highlights the nonexpressive, thereby robbing the conventional
interpretations of reality their relevance and power (Schrader 1972: 11). He contrasts a sparse
verisimilitude, what he calls the everyday with a dislocating application of the cut devoid of
external (narrative or spatial logic) and internal (psychological logic) and called disparity
(Schrader 1972: 39-42).

109
Realism is a stylisation rather than a nave verisimilitude. In the first place, the everyday
is given as a meticulous representation of the dull, banal commonplaces of everyday living (Schrader
1972: 39 italics in original). The everyday is said to reject all the biased interpretations of
reality (Schrader 1972: 39): that is, the traditional modes of classical realism for which reality is
a determined accentuation of symbolic, subjective, expressionistic or plot-motivated images.
Reality, then, is rendered inexpressive, cold, and baring only the rudimentary configuration of
objects of naturalism.

The everyday celebrates the bare threshold of existence, those banal occurrences which
separate the living from the dead, the physical from the material, those occurrences which
so many people equate with life itself (Schrader 1972: 39).

Schrader endorses Robert Bressons description of the everyday in film as a surface-aesthetics


(Schrader 1972: 62). It is not a documentary truth of an event (the cinma-vrit) (Schrader
1972: 63), or a rationalised, interpretative view, but merely the appearance of surfaces, isolated
(as shots) from each other, minimalising or resisting immediate articulation of meaning.
Disparity is identified as an actual or potential disunity between man and his environment
(Schrader 1972: 42 italics in original). Schrader states, at this point, that disunity culminates in a
decisive action (Schrader 1972: 42 italics in original), appearing to suggest a plot point or an
inciting incident as he concedes. However, he distinguishes the transcendental style from
classical narrative through a sense of its touching the transcendent ground of being through
sudden and unexpected emotional expression, solemnity, suffering, agony; each abruptly breaking
the surface of the everyday, but dislocated and unmotivated by environment or humane
instinct (Schrader 1972: 43). This disparity is said to disturb the logic of relations to invite
discomfort, dread or awe. In short, [d]isparity is the paradox of the spiritual existing within the
physical, and it cannot be resolved by any earthly logic or human emotions (Schrader 1972:
82).
He adds a third, final, element to the transcendental style, that of stasis: a frozen view
of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it (Schrader 1972: 49). This quiescent
view of life (Schrader 1972: 49), deduced again from both Ozu and Bresson, re-establishes the
totality of being, or existential experience. It is neither ineffable nor mysterious, reconciliatory

110
nor memorialising, it is the everyday once again expressed as surface, as inexpressive, unwilled
being.
He identifies a famous scene in Ozus Late Spring (1950): the shot of a static vase interjects
with the images of a daughter, her sleeping father, and the daughter erupting into tears. He argues
[t]he vase is stasis, a form which can accept deep, contradictory emotion and transform it into an
expression of something unified, permanent, transcendent (Schrader 1972: 49). For Schrader,
expressing the transcendent is a matter of form, one that evokes a universal affect, where the
human forms of expression are transcended by a universal form of expression (Schrader 1972:
86).
In this way Andr Bazins historiological deployment of the sacred and profane is
reversed. In the essay The Ontology of the Photographic Image, he had argued that photography,
and by extension the cinema, had freed painting from the original sin of Western art, of
attempting to recreate a copy of the world through an obsession with likeness (Bazin 1971a 12).
The indexical image of the cinema, always already and passively bearing the mark of the real, had
canonized the human, sensual and profane (Schrader 1972: 158). It was abundant with the
imitative, experiential and existential. It could automatically produce instant empathy (Schrader
1972: 158). Bazin claimed that from the earliest sacred artefacts of primitive art to the cinematic
image, there was a steady profanation of the arts. Schrader claims that in the case of
transcendental style, in the hands of directors such as Ozu and Bresson, the cinema became
instead progressively sacred (Schrader 1972: 158). It begins with the abundance of the
everyday which it ruptures through the disparity of dislocated events and then transcends
through a formal rather than rational or motivated stasis (Schrader 1972: 159). It therefore
presents the formal codes of mystery accessed through the mute affect of images:
Transcendental style can bring us nearer to that silence, that invisible image, in which the parallel
lines of religion and art meet and interpenetrate (Schrader 1972: 169).
Schrader maintains that a spiritual effect, in terms of a cinematic style, is not determined
by religious themes. It is the identification of a set of formal characteristics for expressing the
mysterious as human experience; hence, it can cross cultural boundaries, linking the minimalism
of Ozu and the spiritualism of zen with Bressons themes of body/soul duality and the turmoil of
predestination and free will, whilst Carl-Theodor Dreyer is said to express the fantastic and the
miraculous. The transcendental style is the form, immanent to the cinema, that is able to express

111
the transcendent or the mysterious. However, for Gilles Deleuze (responding to Schrader),
[t]here is no need at all to call on a transcendence (Deleuze 2005b: 17) since it is possible to re-
write the transcendent as a form of time-image that brings the mysterious back under the sign of
the immanent.
Deleuze recalls Schraders example from Ozus Late Spring, that of the vase interposed
between a daughters half smile and the beginning of her tears. Whilst such a link may speak
through the logic of ellipsis, for Deleuze it represents a special type of opsign (making time and
thought perceptible). He is drawn to the image of the vase, as what he calls a still-life. It is, he
claims, the moment when the cinema is most like the photograph and most radically distinct from
it. Moreover, a still-life composition in the cinema is imbued with a fixed duration and with
duration comes a particular consciousness of time, of being in time (Deleuze 2005b: 16). Time
itself does not change but change occurs in time. The use of the still-life in Ozus cinema is
identified with the initial rupture in the transition from the movement-image to the time-image.
The still-life presents a little time in the pure state (Deleuze 2005b: xii). As a pure time-image,
it encapsulates all of the chaos of the world, that is the dynamic flux of chaos and cosmos that is
central to Deleuzes broader ontological concerns, and that can be traced back to the chaosmos
of The Logic of Sense (Deleuze 2004: 201). The still-life, which may seem a picture of order and
stasis, presents a window onto time, a moment in isolation that unhinges the logic of cause and
effect and opens the viewing experience up to the indiscernible and the indeterminable,
because the spectator is presented not with the logic of motor action but the simple visual
description of an optical situation (Deleuze 2005b: 7). A time-image forces to its surface the
immanence of change within the unity of time. Here one and the same horizon links the cosmic
to the everyday, the durable to the changing, one single and identical time as the unchanging form
of that which changes (Deleuze 2005b: 17).
The opsign is part of the broader category of time-images that Deleuze locates under the
rubric of crystals of time (Bogue 2003: 107). In David Rodowicks analysis,

indiscernibility is the key to understanding what Deleuze means by a crystalline image.


Like an image produced in a mirror, it always has two poles: actual and virtual. [] What
indiscernibility makes visible is the ceaseless fracturing or splitting of nonchronological
time. In this manner, facets of the time-image crystallize around four axes actual and

112
virtual, real and imaginary, limpid and opaque, seed and milieu organized as figures of
indiscernibility (Rodowick 1997: 92).

Deleuze takes that which Schrader identifies with the mysterious linked thematically and
textually to the particular modes of expression of the Holy or spiritual to extrapolate a
broader immanence, not a fantasy or illusion but a relationship between objects and their mental
description, what Deleuze calls the actual and the virtual (in Rodowick 1997: 92).
Michael Goddard has suggested that this indiscernibility, located in the regime of the
crystal image, enables Deleuze to re-inscribe the spiritual into the immanent. The crystal image
becomes the locus around which mysticism, formerly inscribed with religious connotations or
drawn from religious traditions, can be redefined according to a wholly immanent form of life and
accessed or expressed through a semiotic system of cinema (Goddard 2001: 63). Goddard points
to a mysticism as a process of subjectivation and the creation of a crystalline regime of signs that
provides a means to represent a spiritual dimension wholly immanent to life in which processes of
creation and differentiation, virtualisation and actualisation are continually taking place (Goddard
2002: 63).
Mysticism extends to the spiritual, since it virtually inher[es] in the material world;
[t]he spiritual and the material are simply two distinct yet indiscernible sides of the same fold and
are derived from the immanent spiritual philosophies of Bergson and Spinoza and distinct from
the transcendent conception of Spirit (Goddard 2002: 62). In Bergsons philosophy [t]he mystical
experience of God or oneness is [] an intensification of difference and an experience of
ecstatic subjectivation or metamorphosis (Goddard 2002: 61).
Despite connotations of mysticism (to the mysterious or spiritual) as a case of either
religious or psychological experience (i.e. reported religious revelation or mental states such as
schizophrenia), the link between the mysterious and the cinematic can be made. Goddard argues
that,

as in the case of the mystic, cinema, in its crystalline forms, can become a spiritual tool,
capable of facilitating an experience of ecstatic subjectivation in which spectators
experience cinema as a pure optical and sound situation, a vision and a voice, a scattering
of time crystals that leads them beyond the boundaries of their static selves and into

113
profound contact with the outside. If static religions always operate strategically by means
of recollection-images, whereas mysticism attempts to relay spiritual movement through
the direct perception of the spiritual, virtual dimensions of life, then the cinema of the
time-image is uniquely placed to tactically disperse the relatively contained time crystals
of mysticism, across the extended circuits of contemporary, secular mass-media
communications (Goddard 2002: 62).

The question of an ecstatic experience recalls the films of Werner Herzog. Alberto Toscano
argues that Herzogs cinema holds a unique place in Deleuzes cinema books as the
exemplification of the crystal image, since it signals a pure experience of time (indiscernible from
eternity) and creation (indiscernible from the impassive) (in Parr 2005, 46). Toscano points to
Deleuzes examples of Aguirre the Wrath of God, Kaspar Hauser (1975) and Heart of Glass (1976), in
which [s]ublimity and a kind of bare life coalesce (in Parr 2005: 47).

We can thus see how the crystal image is not simply a matter of a certain kind of
intuition, but involves the construction of scenarios with their own very special kinds of
actions, revealing Herzogs genius for joining the most deprived and infinitesimal of
creatures with the most cosmic and grandiose of projects (in Parr 2005: 48).

In various ways and through recourse to a variety of terms, from revelation and redemption to
transcendental and immanent, Bazin and Kracauer, Schrader and Deleuze have circulated a sense
of the world that is in excess of the logical terms of cause and effect and of the psychologically
motivated terms of rational thought, interpretation and meaning. Central to each is a fundamental
relation to the everyday, an underlying and always already real, drawn out of an indexical
photographic link to the object and phenomenological and existential modes of sensible, and
sensuous, experience. Whether through the prolongation of spectatorial attention in the sequence
shot (Bazin), or an everyday that is coupled with a dislocating and disrupting mode of editing
that exposes gaps in the rational, spatial organisation of image and meaning to give access to an
ontological experience of presence (Kracauer, Schrader, Deleuze) and whether such gaps evoke
the terms of the Holy, the spiritual or the virtual: in each case, the aim has been to identify or
express a unity or ontological ground. Whether this takes the form of a transcendent totality of

114
the Lebenswelt (Kracauer) or a productive network of becoming (Deleuze), each seeks to separate
an experiential moment of presence from a predetermined representation or signifying formula
for an ideal truth. But, in seeking to redeem the world as a metaphysical unity, above and
beyond specific conditions such as those of violence and suffering, sin and evil they attempt
to redeem the images of the world. It is a world that is fallen because it has been re-presented in
images. They seek to reconstitute and disrupt those images to give the world back to thought. In
Deleuzes words, [t]he modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world [] It is not we
who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film [] Only belief in the world
can reconnect man to what he sees and hears (Deleuze 2005b: 166).
However, faced specifically with the violent, antagonistic and destructive, and the
suffering it produces, is it the sense of the world, as images, that needs to be rethought, or the
sense of how we make sense of that world. It is not so much that the real needs to be
reconnected with thought as that thought needs to be reconnected with the real. To that extent,
Werner Herzog offers one more aspect to consider.
So much of Herzogs cinema seeks to present, through the filmed image, and the act of
filming, an experiential testimony to the world. His films offer a perpetual presentation of the
limit situation of experience; the rhetorical recourse to the transcendent acting as a frame or
marker of the limits of sense, opening the presentation of the image to experience as such, prior
to or in excess of the limits of interpretation. Operating in excess of the determination of the
existential subject through the presentation of nothing but the evidence of the visible, Herzog
points away from the phenomenologically influenced relationship to the real in Bazin, Kracauer
and Wenders, at least, to something like the real as a post-phenomenological presentation
suggested by Jean-Luc Nancy. Moreover, in Herzogs films, the fragments of experience are
inevitably processes of undoing in which the images of the indexically real persistently mark a
movement beyond the integration of ideality and materiality, of the conceptual and the sensuous,
to present what is supplemental to such configuration. It ceases to be representation even in
the sense Russell attributes to Wenders and post-war modernism of the existential questioning
of meaning and closure that is limited by the movement towards death, decay or ruin. It is the
presentation, even as a process of ruination, or a ruining as it occurs, continues to occur, or
maintains itself in occurring even after the event without announcing the finality that is the
inevitability of ruination or death. It is a movement away from a unity or overarching sense of

115
existence; its ground or immanent flow. Rather, it is a movement of unravelling; not an
encounter with significance so much as an opening onto the insignificance that suspends the
representation of all finality, either redemption or damnation, life or death.
It is evident that so many of Herzogs films end with either suspension or with the
primordial: from the monkeys adrift on Aguirres raft to the dancing chicken of Stroszek (1976),
caught in a repeating loop; the endlessly circulating truck that completes both Stroszek and Even
Dwarfs Started Small (1970), and the latters endlessly laughing man. Lessons of Darkness ends with
the re-lighting of fires; Bells from the Deep (1993) closes with the Bruegelesque skaters and
fishermen on the sacred lake; and The Wild Blue Yonder with the description of a prehistoric Earth,
a new beginning. Herzog does not aim for meaning but to release it towards what Jean-Luc Nancy
has called the infamy of insignificance that is the everyday of existence (Nancy 2008a: 38).
Certainly, a film will drag insignificance back into the light of significance, into the aesthetic, but
as something that escapes representation. This is the kind of birth to presence that Nancy
outlines:

The epoch of representation is as old as the West. It is not certain that the West itself is
not a single, unique epoch, coextensive with humanity [] This means that the end is
not in sight, even if humanitys self-suppression is now a possibility in humanitys general
program. And, consequently, the end of representation is not in sight. There is, perhaps,
no humanity (and, perhaps, no animality) that does not include representation although
representation may not exhaust what, in man, passes infinitely beyond man (Nancy 1993:
1).

In this earlier work on aesthetics Nancy seeks to realign attention from the representational
towards a simple presence of the object that may contain representations but never define them.
What then passes beyond so many possible representations is a passage towards insignificance,
which elsewhere, Nancy identifies as the cinemas proper inclination:

What would come back then to the proper of cinema, beyond narration and image,
beyond editing and shooting, beyond script, actors or dialogues all the elements that can

116
be the concern of quasi literary, pictorial, even musical approaches would be this
singular manner of being nothing but the linking of evidence (Nancy 2001: 78).

Montage, in this way, is less dialectical or psychologically and causally motivated. It is driven by
the accumulation of fragments; not so much as the proactive formulation of a story or idea as it is
reactive, the gathering of evidence.

[T]he most properly distinctive property of cinema, and, perhaps also that which can be
least distinguished, the most indistinguishable property of the enormous flow of films
throughout the world, is the linking, the indefinite sliding along of its presentation (Nancy
2001: 78).

This sliding along defers the epiphany of meaning or the appeal to significance and plays,
instead, on a move towards insignificance:

The insignificance of life that offers itself these images, always in movement, going
toward no mystery, no revelation, only this sliding along by means of which it leads itself
from one image to another (exemplary, subliminal, banal, grotesque or nave, tampered
with, sketchy or overloaded) (Nancy 2001: 78).

Herzogs ecstatic truth, Schraders transcendental or Deleuzes immanence appear to retain a


necessity for revelation, mysterious or otherwise, a profound realisation through a moment of
disjunction or an instant of recognition, in the impossibility of fully understanding being. Nancy,
by contrast and Herzogs films, despite himself realign the condition of being onto the
movement of cinema as that which continuously escapes recognition the presence and
withdrawal that is the real of sense.

(iii) Jean-Luc Nancy: the exposed real

Nancys approach to the cinema begins with something like a phenomenological and ontological
conception after Andr Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, but with key differences. Where the latter

117
sought to reinforce an ontology of cinematic realism, and to that extent locate a redemption of
and through the cinematic image in a totalising connection with a meaningful world, Nancy shifts
the emphasis from world to sense, in which world is sense, fragmentary and accessed
through an abundance of signification. Here the world is not a place with a singular, meaningful
state, but is simply the locus of multiple, potential and conflicting meanings. The loss of an
originary or singularly determined world does not result in meaninglessness. In fact, there is not a
loss at all but a gain, since a world of formless signifiers is the world itself, an always already there
world of sense.
In The Evidence of Film, dedicated to the work of Abbas Kiarostami, Nancy confirms that
the industry of cinema is, has been, and most often remains, a cinema of representation, what he
calls an art of the imaginary (myth) and a semiology or language of signs (Nancy 2001: 18). Yet
what he finds in the work of Kiarostami is a cinema of metaphysical meditation, though this does
not mean a treating of metaphysical themes (for example, in the sense that Ingmar Bergmans
Seventh Seal does). Rather, it means a cinematic metaphysics, cinema as the place of meditation,
as its body and its realm, as the taking-place of a relation to the sense of the world (Nancy 2001:
44). Nancy claims no interest in the history of cinematic styles or the fascination with images of
representation and their meaning the culture of the image but is drawn to the way in which
Kiarostamis technique makes evident a conspicuous form of the world, a form or a sense
(Nancy 2001: 10-12). Acknowledging more than a century of cinematic practice and its evolved
theories of representation, of reality and illusion, Nancy argues that a way of looking has
developed that is decidedly no longer a look at representation (painting or photography, theater or
any kind of spectacle). Instead, he argues for a difference that describes a certain posture: a
looking on while continually perceiving the environment of the thing beheld and adds that it is a
penetration before it is a consideration or a contemplation (Nancy 2001: 14).
Despite Nancys elusive language, it is clear that his aim is to identify a direct link
between what is presented in the film and what exists, as a fragment of sense, in the profilmic.
He is, however, insistent that this real is neither realist nor a phantasm of the fictional, but is
simply life presented or offered in its evidence (Nancy 2001: 58, italics in original). Such a
presentation does not attempt to master its material, only to present it as descriptive, episodic
fragments. This form of aesthetic realism relies on Nancys key term of patency, or thereness,
developed from the Heideggarian being-in-the-world. Nancy connects patency with a number

118
of other terms that speak of an approach, attitude, or concern for the images being presented: the
terms regard, respect and ethos (Nancy 2001):

In French regard (look) and gard (regard) are more or less the same word: re-gard
indicates a propitious distance for an intensified guard (garde), for looking after (prise en
garde) (it is a Germanic root, wardon/warten, that yields all these words). Guarding calls
for a watching and waiting, for observing, for tending attentively and overseeing (Nancy
2001: 38).

Such terms extend from the Heideggarian care that is attributed to being-in-the-world. For
Heidegger, care is a combination of both the sense of concern or anxiety and a caring for, and
equally involves the negative aspects of concern and neglect, the careful and the careless. Care is
equiprimordial: neither aspect has precedence over the other. It embodies Dasein (Heideggers
human Being) and relates it to its everydayness, its preoccupation with all the entities it
encounters; of being with others and of being with things: of being in the world (Inwood 2000:
58). Michael Inwood points to three constituents of care: its being ahead of itself, a kind of
suspense; being already in the world, the always already fact of being in a situation, what Heidegger
also calls thrownness; and being alongside entities within the world, or engaged in a present task or
state of mind, which is often referred to as fallenness. Care is correlative to the significance of
the world (Inwood 2000: 59).
Stephen Mulhall, in a close reading of Being and Time, also accentuates the link between
care and anxiety with regard to everydayness. In short, care stands for the fact that [t]he world
and everything in it is something that cannot fail to matter (Mulhall 2005b: 112).

[A]nxiety lays bare the basis of Daseins existence as thrown projection fallen into the
world. Daseins thrownness (exemplified in its openness to states-of-mind) shows it to be
already in a world; its projectiveness (exemplified in its capacity for understanding) shows
it to be at the same time ahead of itself, aiming to realize some existential possibility; and
its fallenness shows it to be preoccupied with the world. This overarching tripartite
characterization reveals the essential unity of Daseins Being to be what Heidegger calls
care (Sorge) (Mulhall 2005b: 112).

119
Nancy applies this kind of care to a cinematic attitude of looking at the world, its integrated
suspense, motion, preoccupation and everydayness that is apparent in the intensity of an
evidence:

Cinemas proposition here is quite far from a vision that is merely a sighting (that looks
in order merely to see): what is evident imposes itself as the setting up of a look. If this
look regards that upon which it casts itself and cares for it, it will have taken care of the
real: of that which resists, precisely, being absorbed in any vision (visions of the world,
representations, imaginations) (Nancy 2001:18).

Nancys realism is not a Platonic form of originary essences, of Forms or Ideas, a conceptual realism
that asserts universals (humanity or truth for instance) as existing independently of human
perception. Nor is it an Aristotelian form of realism linking universals that only exist within objects
in the external world the question of categories (form, matter or both) and translated, in
classical narrative theory, to the relations of cause and effect. It is closer to a form of ontological
realism (a theory of what there is) in which we live in a world that exists independently of us, some
aspects of which are beyond our perceptual grasp. It invites an ontological perspective of the
cinema that predates the predominantly representational, semiotic critiques that, crudely
speaking, identify the three key stages of cinematic form and narrative. First, the classical cinema
represents this Aristotelian formula of cause and effect that gives a representation of a pre-
conceived world. Second, a modernist cinema confronts the perceived loss of meaning resulting in
the collapse of this pre-conceived world and its traditional representations and therefore seeks to
represent this loss of meaning. To do so it utilises aspects of realism (or neo-realism) that is then
undermined through the distortions of subjective (point-of-view) crises, or a self-reflexive
foregrounding of the means of production. Thirdly, the post-modern cinema follows as one of
pastiche and parody, irony and reflexivity, and of an overwhelming fascination with images in
themselves. It remains caught in the traditional forms of meaning and representation in its bid to
overcome the modernist loss of meaning with its restitution of traditional structures.
In Twilight of the Idols Nietszche had dismantled the Platonic assertion of a Real World
(the suprasensible world of Ideas) through various states of Western philosophy to demonstrate

120
the collapse of the real world into the apparent worlds of fable. Heidegger responded that in
opposing reality to appearance and therefore asserting fiction, Nietzsche was merely remaining
caught in the metaphysical foundation of real and apparent opposition. As Nancys sometime
collaborator Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says, appearance is nothing other than the product of
reality (in James 2006: 24). Ian James adds that, [i]n the world become fable, a world devoid of
ideality, of suprasensible essences or identities, the real is not overturned in favour of the
apparent, rather any distinction between the two ceases to be operable (James 2006: 24). By
thinking without recourse to this opposition, Nancy attempts to go beyond Heidegger with an
aesthetic presentation that is a form of what he calls exscription: the process of presentation and
withdrawal that takes place in any literary or artistic practice. The artwork does not proclaim a
pre-given reality around which redemption might be located. Nor does it prescribe an idealist
formula or axiom for signification. As James remarks:

as the pure presentation of presentation, the tracing of a figure or form beyond whose line
sense absents itself, art, for Nancy, is an exposure of truth, a touching of the real of a
world, beyond or in excess of any mediation through signifying systems or discourses. Art
exposes or touches a fragment of world (James 2006: 229).

Touch, a key term in Nancys philosophy, is applied unexpectedly to the cinema (Nancy 2001: 42)
as a means to broaden sense beyond the visual. Presence is not a mere matter of vision: it offers
itself in encounters, worries, concerns (Nancy 2001: 30). Laura McMahon notes: Relations
between film, viewer and world can thus be read in terms of an interruptive continguity, a
contact-in-separation, echoing the deconstructive spacing of Nancys touch (McMahon 2010: 77)
the deconstructive spacing being that which seeks to engage with contact and materiality
without recourse to self-identity or self-presence (McMahon 2010: 78).
What is at stake in the look, or regard, is the terms in which the cinema confronts the
spectator with a fragment of a recognisably experiential world that comprises of, but is not
reduced to, the mediation of signifying symbols or discourses. It relates to a real that is less
drawn from moments of contingency or authentic documentary duration (as in Bazin, Kracauer
or Wenders in particular), than it is a matter of selection and distillation of the fragments of a
thematic continuity that presents, exposes or touches a particular sense of the world. At the

121
same time, a series of fragments is selected and organised precisely in the terms of its excess and
withdrawal of the means of signification and the possibilities of determinate meaning. As an
artwork, it is both a fragment of the world it touches and a withdrawal from that world as the
presentation of a fragment separate from the world. It does not inscribe a unity of meaning to
ground its world, nor does it represent an ideal or symbolic interpretation of a world, a subject or
a thought process. It is neither an ahistorical, formal style (Schrader), nor a specific type of image
(Deleuze). It is closest to Herzogs ecstatic truth but without the boldness of such a claim. It is,
simply, the enframing of a singular-plural fragment of sense. What remains is for that touching
of sense and the affect of the look to be addressed to the symbols and the reality of violence,
confrontation and the destructive aspects of experience. In response to these themes the films of
Part Two operate around a concept of sense drawn, I suggest, from those aspects of distress,
realism and suspense that Nancy identifies. Distress attaches to those recognisable moments and
sense impressions of shared anxiety and dread prior to meaning, recognition or understanding.
Realism is the mode of exposure, at the limits, of the phenomenological and the symbolic, the
material and the ideative. Suspense is that aspect of the cinema that moves without revelation,
holding, as Nancy susggests, the step of thought suspended over this sense that has already touched us
(Nancy 1997: 11 original in italics). This is the focus of Part Two.

122
PART TWO

Films

123
CHAPTER 5

A-religious Confession: Elephant

The previous chapter outlined a series of responses to the concept of realism in the cinema,
moving finally towards that proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy, who seeks to redefine the image as an
opening onto a real (an affective, experiential sense) that exists as an excess of representation.
This distinguishes Nancys view of the real from the earlier, traditional theories of cinematic
realism such as Andr Bazins indexical realism or Siegfried Kracauers mnemonic vision with its
concrete relation with physical reality. Accordingly, Nancys claims are closer to, but remain at a
distance from theories that seek to access the affective forces of the real such as Paul Schraders
attempt to locate the mystery of the Holy in the dislocations of the everyday, or Gilles
Deleuzes ultimate assertion of pure immanence with its continuous real of virtual relations
imbued with a utopian power of thought.
Nancys interruptive or syncopatic mode of discontinuous existence presents the
film image as a fragment of a sense of the world, at once presented and withdrawn. Nancys aim
is to think the image in terms that avoid its being reinscribed and encoded within the logic of
representation, thereby being constantly subservient to the symbols, archetypes and paradigms of
interpretation. Yet, crucially, for a relation to the real of violence and redemption, Nancys
system does not seek to do away with the logic of symbols to locate a new ground of judgement.
Rather, it is through the limits of symbolic and representational signification that sense is to be
exposed. Reality is not dependent on a distinction between the contingent or the actual in
opposition to the fictive or the symbolic. It is the limit situation of the orders of signification, that
which suspends them or is in excess of their logic. It is foremost a means of looking at the world
that is always already present but yet to be re-presented. Nancy observes, [i]n the end, looking
just amounts to thinking the real, to test oneself with regard to a meaning one is not mastering
(Nancy 2001: 38).
This provides a particularly nuanced diagnostic for considering the relations between
violence and redemption, since such a relation traditionally depends on a logic of symbolisation (in
Ricoeurs terms) and articulation where a desire to make sense of the violent depends on a

124
principle of cause and effect. However, empahsising the affective demand for redemption when
the terms of that redemption have been suspended or withdrawn recalls Nancys relation of the
image to violence and truth. The bad violence, that which is true for being violent, is an excess
of violence that speaks of nothing but itself. It is the violence of representation and the spectacle of
destruction. A true violence, that which is violent because it is true, consists in maintaining an
imminent dread. It is the jolt of recognition that comes, as Nancy suggests, with the revelation of
this: that there is nothing to reveal (Nancy 2005: 26).
The clearest case of the effects of the cinematic image of violence, one that both offers and
withdraws interpretation, exposition or meaning, is that of the actuality of a violent event.
Perhaps the most famous single actuality is not one of the Lumire Brothers inaugural reels in
cinema history but the famous Zapruder film that caught the moment of the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963. Pier Paolo Pasolini took this piece of film
as the starting point for a short meditation on the relationship between the shot and the
montage entitled Observations on the Long Take, at the end of which he concluded that the
cut in cinema does for the shot what death accomplishes for life (Pasolini 1980: 6).
In short, Pasolini argued that the shot (in particular the long take) was the cinemas
primordial element (Pasolini 1980: 3), a present tense equation with a viewed reality.
Moreover, it was a subjective view since it was singular and must therefore equate to a singular
point-of-view even if the passive recording apparatus of the camera is detached from a human
eye-line, the shot still represents a spectators singular, subjective, point-of-view on the present
reality as it unfolds. Such a primordial, present tense reality, configures a language of
nonsymbolic signs (Pasolini 1980: 4) that are incomplete, indecisive, mysterious. What is
required is an objectivity, a work of choice and coordination (Pasolini 1980: 5) to give meaning
to the shot and other shots. Such is montage which transforms present into past (Pasolini 1980:
5). A fleeting or continuous present of reality is transformed into an historic present (Pasolini
1980: 5) in the course of which meaning is constructed.
Taking the Zapruder film as his starting point, Pasolini argues that the long take duration
of the film, unedited, from a single point of view presents one primordial element of reality,
evasive and indecisive essentially meaningless. Because it remains incomplete, that is, not
encrypted into something like a language system with other shots, it remains only in potentia a
potentiality, modifiable by other shots, or eventual future actions (Pasolini 1980: 5). Deleuze

125
offers much the same argument with the proposition that cinematic images, broken apart by the
cut, contain virtual meanings yet to be revealed (Rancire 2006: 110).
Pasolini goes on to imagine multiple Zapruder films, all taken from different points of
view, each a singular primordial element in itself, loaded with nonsymbolic signs, fragmentary
and incomplete languages, all but incomprehensible (Pasolini 1980, 4). Montage, the rigorous
efforts of a diligent detective, gives them meaning through combination. The leap that equates the
cut with death, convert[s] our present, which is infinite, unstable, and uncertain, and thus
linguistically indescribable, into a clear, stable, certain, and thus linguistically describable past
(Pasolini 1980: 6). It was Pasolinis belief that reality was a language for which a proper
semiology had yet to be discovered: I have said frequently, and always poorly, that reality has its
own language better still, it is a language which, to be described, requires a general semiology,
which at present we do not possess (Pasolini 1980: 5). This language was to be found in the
actions or gestures of human beings. Such actions modify reality and as such, leave a spiritual
imprint upon it (Pasolini 1980: 5). But all the while, such actions remain incomplete; they lack
unity and therefore, meaning (Pasolini 1980: 5).
Pasolinis recourse to the Zapruder film raises certain points that he does not address,
since his primary motive for its reference is to support the example of the single, subjective point
of view shot: a primordial element of reality. He then speculates, through the imaginary
existence of countless, variable Zapruder films, the possibility of accurately documenting the
sequence of events as they occurred though he makes no claims to solving the broader (and still
unsolved) mystery of who killed Kennedy, or why, on that particular day, in that way.
Nevertheless, he makes much the same argument as Godard, but in reverse. Where, for Godard,
it is a matter of extracting shots already consigned to a unity an inappropriate or corrupted unity
and return them to their status as potentialities (then re-inscribed with their true meaning), for
Pasolini, each singular, primordial shot is a unity of reality, an indexical unity much like Bazins.
What Pasolini does not consider is the shift that takes place with regard to a shot,
sequence or film, after the fact. In looking for a meaning in a primordial element of the cinema,
only from its completion in a unified context idea, narrative, history (he is nonspecific, only
equating it with a life) he deprives the limit situation of an incomplete image of its own
potential as an indecisive disclosure. He overlooks the impetus of a certain type of suspense. This
is brought to the fore when the film is watched by a spectator who is already fully aware of, and

126
therefore expects, the assassination and the moment of the bullets impact. With this awareness,
the orientation of the experience of watching the sequence alters. The indecision that accompanies
an incomplete shot or for that matter, an accumulation of incomplete shots as a multitude of
Zapruder films would remain repositions the experiencing of cinematic images as a suspension,
a tension and a demand. It insists upon an always already sense of the primacy of events in the
world, which Pasolini admits to: The substance of cinema is therefore an endless long take, as is
reality to our senses for as long as we are able to see and feel (Pasolini 1980: 5). It shifts the
emphasis from death to life. For Pasolini lives become expressive at the point of death because
while living we lack meaning. Death condenses life into a pattern of significant moments (Pasolini
1980: 6, italics in original). But alternatively, could it not be the case that to lack meaning is to be
living and to be living is to experience the limits of meaning, which would be the cinemas
demand?
The presentation of a suspension explicitly calls into question Pasolinis notion of a
conversion of the linguistically indescribable present into a linguistically describable past
(Pasolini 1980: 6). Such a conflict, or limit situation, drives to the heart of Gus Van Sants
treatment of a real life incident (an historical actuality) in his 2003 film Elephant. In this case, it
is not so much a matter of transforming the present into the past as it is a case of transforming
the past back into a present, precisely because it remains undecidable as an event.
Elephant depicts, through a series of overlapping and partially repeating sequences,
fragments of the events preceding, leading up to and during a shooting committed by two students
in a contemporary American high school. Several students are singled out, including the two
killers, and the film describes, in a dispassionate, observational style of lengthy Steadicam shots,
brief moments, exchanges and episodes in the daily routines of its characters. One student, Elias,
takes photographs of his peers on the way to school, processes the photographs and walks to the
library. Another, John, tries to contact family members to assist his alcoholic father waiting
outside the school. Nathan finishes football practice and meets his girlfriend, Carrie, who believes
that she is pregnant. Three girls have lunch then force themselves to vomit in the toilets. Michelle
has a PE lesson then heads for library duties. Eric meets Alex. They head for the school where,
armed with assault rifles, they go on a shooting rampage, killing students and staff before Alex
shoots Eric. The film ends suspended at the moment when Alex has cornered Nathan and
Carrie in the school kitchen.

127
Elephant is a film that exists because words have failed. The event it depicts has (so far)
proved itself to be essentially indescribable, at least in the sense of providing any meaning, motive,
or understanding for its happening. Nevertheless, such events continue to occur, each as
meaningless as the last. When words fail, all the narratives, motives, meanings and
presuppositions, all the tethers to the logic of reason also appear to fail. Faced with such a collapse
of interpretation, in place of telling, the film Elephant looks on. It persists in looking as an
imagined witness to the ebb and flow of the everyday conditions of its imminent, violent event. As
a silent witness, it gathers an index of moments as they may have been, aborted or unfulfilled, the
remnants of motion, of gesture, of time as it passes or as it may have passed, and plays them and
replays them. It is a film conditioned by a certain compulsion, a dread, collapsing together the
sheer inability to resist looking and the necessary persistence of looking also; and taking time,
both passing time (slowly) and grabbing time back or arresting time. In the face of the rupture of
violence that stalks the timeframe of Elephant, the cinemas conformity to a frictionless process of
action and reaction can no longer ring true, and the historical causes of the films final moments
have already passed incomprehensibly. Elephant is something of a remainder: it describes what
remains, it is the visible excess, beyond all the words and interpretations. It exposes the elephant
in the room the unavoidable evidence that cannot be spoken of. This is the part of the present
that Pasolini fails to account for: that which remains when the historic presents continue to
evade meaning.
The film is a re-imagining of an American high-school shooting so clearly reminiscent of
the one which took place at Columbine High School on 20 th April 1999 that the actual incident
and the film are inextricably intertwined. The film found critical acclaim it won the Palme dOr at
Cannes in 2003 but it was reviled in equal measure, especially in parts of the United States,
where the Hollywood journal Variety, most notably, called it gross and exploitative and
pointless at best and irresponsible at worst (McCarthy 2003), which perhaps says more about the
closeness of events to a national consciousness, a response to the rubbing of sores, than it does of
the films particular cinematic attributes. Van Sant appropriated the title from a 1988 work by the
British director Alan Clark, a short, forty minute television film that addressed the sectarian
killings taking place in Northern Ireland with a distillation of the acts of murder walking, killing,
and the stillness of death utterly devoid of sectarian identities, of motive, punishment,
justification or redemption. Van Sants Elephant adopts that same forensic observation and turns it

128
onto a cross-sectional group of high-school students connected only by their collective proximity
in the moments before one mass killing. Such an apparent reserve, the elevation of a delineated
showing over an explanatory telling, may disturb the consciences of those searching for, or
demanding, reasons for such violent, murderous actions. And yet, it is perhaps precisely this
resistance to dramatic psychology, to motives and morals, judgements and platitudes to words
and the traditional modes of narrative; to the plotting and revealing of meaning that makes the
film such a painstaking and measured consideration of an essentially inexplicable act.
However, the refusal of the interpretative mechanisms of traditional narrative forms,
whether classical (of determined representations) or modernist (at least, a certain subjective
existentialism), should not be taken simply to assert that Elephant operates nothing more than an
opposition or a negation of conventional representational tropes evoking only meaninglessness.
Rather, if it can be said to have a responsibility, it lies in its address in which the playing, or
replaying, of lost time deliberately undermines the clamour of instants that define an event
historically, of time, place, identity, or act, as they are used in the reconstruction of facts into
interpretations according to the recognisable evidence.
There is a line of argument that says that a replaying of such distressing events as a high-
school shooting is nothing but a ghoulish spectacle or a glamorisation that can only encourage the
repetition of atrocity; that it can only plant the idea and instruct in the means. But such a
reductive argument would seem to misconstrue the nuances and diversity of spectatorship, and
raises the question of to whom such a film might be making its appeal. Furthermore, naively
disregarding the unstoppable abundance of images, provocations and instructions ever present in
the world casts the cinema as subject to a self-censorship, a Bilderverbot. Conversely, it serves
merely as an endorsement for the cartoonish excesses of violence deemed permissible on account
of a self-evidently illusory or fantastic styling or by recourse to the repetition of lazily co-opted
moral frameworks. The latter is a perpetual hub around which particular strains of post-modern
pastiche and irony revolve in an ever-circulating dance of the damned. Kim Newman has written
of the shift, over the last decade, in the orientation of the horror film from near parables of
transgression and punishment to extended brutality and the mechanics of cruelty as the raison dtre
of generic form (Newman 2006). The complexities of Newmans thesis are beyond the scope of
the present study, but suffice it to say that a distinction is necessary between the type of suspense
and deferral enacted in these explicitly generic films that might be summarised accordingly: The

129
slasher or torture-porn genres tap into a certain vernacular relation between audience and
spectacle; the audience already recognising and expecting the tropes the film delivers. Traditional
modes of suspense are applied in which the tensions and fates of the killer, victims and survivors
are accounted for and order is temporarily restored through the escape of the final victim rather
than the fate of the killer. Finally, the fate of the killer is deferred through the mechanism of the
sequel. This is a crucially different deferral from that set out in this thesis. Rather, it is one in
which the deferral of justice or punishment is encoded into the logic of the serialised cliffhanger
ending and the symbolic structures of the genre. Overall, these films separate themselves from the
world through their immersion in their representational archetypes. Contrary to this, and to
reiterate Gus Van Sant on the subject of the violence in Elephant, it is because audiences believe
the violence of Elephant that it disturbs (in Sad 2004, 18).
The fact is that Elephant appears to withdraw more than it reveals. It presents the fear
itself, the suspense in imminence of a terror that floats like a spectre down the halls of a high
school. It has stripped itself of every archetype, of every psychological, narrative, generic, thrilling
point of reference to rely on nothing but the anxiety of its audiences collective memories. In that
respect it is the trembling culmination and the rolling banality of imminent violence locked into
immediate history. It is a violence turned systemic: the incomprehensible consequence of what
infiltrates the seamless procession of modern everyday existence. In its reduction, having
dispensed with the varying logic of narrative genre and withdrawn from the reflexive concerns of
a modernist intervention into the semiotics of the mediated image, it has enframed an event
rather than emplotted it. It operates a form of cutting, couched in terms of ellipsis and
repetition, that serves to reinforce its essential insistence on looking that carries with it something
of an inheritance born of the primitive cinema of attractions. It is an inheritance that is both an
unearthing and an overturning. On the one hand, it is an inheritance that retains the insistence that
classical narration or representational illusion is neither a rule nor inevitability, and one that is
perhaps even exhausted under such brutal, factual circumstances, and that cinema properly begins
with a direct address to the look, a display of fragmentary moments conceived as autonomous
shots and scenes and only then, passed through a composition of montage constructed as a passage
or continuance of autonomous fragments not subordinated to an overarching plot or meaning. On
the other hand, those aspects of the inheritance that revelled in the self-conscious exhibitionism of
actors and of spectacle are overturned with something like an insistence upon the look directed at

130
a condition, or a state of affairs; of a deliberate anonymity and actuality; of persons absorbed into a
fleeting presence and its passing.
The legacy of an early, so-called pre-narrative cinema for Elephant is less that it asserts or
attempts to impose a new kind of representational cinema but rather that it has recourse to what
has always been present in the cinema, an indexical link between the apparatus and that which
presents itself to it. Such a revisionism of the pre-narrative traits performed as a bond between
diegesis and apparatus is distinct from the self-reflexive distrust of apparatus reminiscent of a
certain kind of anti-narrative post-Second World War modernism that is still with us, a line that
runs from Jean-Luc Godard to Michael Haneke, for whom the site of cinemas realist artifice and
illusory sleight-of-hand is the site of its necessary guilt. For that matter, a return to a point prior
to classical narrative is a return to a point prior, also, to such narratives subjective opposite, the
existential crises of another kind of post-Second World War modernism in which the
phenomenology of the world is determined by the psychological crises of its protagonists cut adrift
in time and place.
Elephant is a film that exists in direct reference to the historical fact of the Columbine
shootings and its media-saturated aftermath. In that respect, it invites three principal lines of
interpretation. Firstly, there is the interpretation of the event of Columbine itself, on the
grounds of which the film is largely criticised for failing to interpret: failing to take a position
with respect to motive or causation and similarly, failing to offer either psychological grounds for
the actions of the killers, or to present a clearly defined order of justice and empathy for the
victims. Secondly, there is a certain modernist position that interprets the withholding of
meaning or interpretation as an intervention or critical rupture of the flow of mass-mediated
images and discourse that followed and surrounded the event. Such a suspension is said to draw
attention to the events mediatised representation and its inadequacies or ideologies. Thirdly,
there is a particular post-modern position that prescribes the event as an inexplicable horror
whose motives cannot be known and the terms of reference are unpresentable. This Lyotardian
inflection, as Jacques Rancire argues, posits the artwork as an act of mourning or a type of
lament drawn from a reconfiguration of the sublime (Rancire 2004: 29).
The parameters of these initial modes of critique come into focus when Elephant is placed
alongside other films that either respond to the Columbine shooting or, more broadly, to
alternative incidents of similarly unpredictable violent content. In the first place, Elephant can be

131
placed alongside the example of Michael Moores polemical treatment of the incident in Bowling
for Columbine (2002).
Moores film accentuates interpretative conventions through its traditional mode of
polemical documentary form. It places fact and its pre-meditated confrontation and
questioning of circumstances at the forefront. Van Sants film, by contrast, operates around an
assumed reference to Columbine and its mediated aftermath, known to its audience, refashioning
events fictively but within parallel scenic circumstances. Elephant also deliberately plays with
points of reference from the mediated discourse, including within it a single line of dialogue
attributed to the actual killers (the innocuous have fun). It also shows the killers watching images
of Nazis on a television documentary, playing violent video games and kissing in the shower. Such
video games, along with neo-Nazism and homosexuality were among the accusations levelled at
the original killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Incidentally, the film also shows the fictional
killers playing Beethovens moonlight sonata on the piano but this was not singled out as a possibly
incriminating reference in reviews of the film. Motives and reasons, explicitly stated in Bowling for
Columbine, such as the easy availability of guns and ammunition, the culture of gun ownership in
the US and the de-humanising conditions of ultra-competitive American high-schools, are only
loosely suggested in Elephant. The teenage killers are seen buying an assault rifle by mail-order
and, briefly, as the victims of a moment of classroom victimisation.
Bowling for Columbine discerns a series of reasons for such a violent rupture into everyday
life and sets about identifying them, identifying the organisations and institutions behind them, and
confronting them. It presents images as facts and facts as the basis of its polemic. Truth or falsity is
played out as a point of argument carried out on screen. Elephant, by contrast, is linked to the
historical event of Columbine through an intertextual relationship. It is that relationship that
continually invites consideration of the film in terms of fiction and falsity; to modes of story
against history, interpretation against impression, and the determining criteria of truth in the
historical and poetic senses. All of which, by extension, invokes claims of irresponsibility and the
terms of responsibility. Bowling for Columbine and Elephant would appear to sit at either pole of
what Jacques Rancire described, recalling the distribution of the sensible, as the two extremes
of aesthetic relationship between what can be said and what can be seen. The essential shift, in
terms of a movement away from what can be said to what is seen emplotting to enframing is
the logic of narrative: its pre-determinations, as to what happened or what could happen

132
(history or fiction) becomes redundant. The aesthetics of an event is entangled in the arrangement
of signs and images. Such is Rancires thwarted fable which serves to problematise any
presuppositions made about the ordering of events, whether fictive or historical, and therefore
places the political centre stage.
Whether or not Elephant is a political film would again seem to hinge on the question of
responsibility towards the historical Columbine itself, where a modernist account is determined
by the films intervention into, or suspension of, the mediatised representation of its factual
equivalent. In this respect, the film recalls Alan Clarkes 1988 film (Elephant) from which Van
Sants film directly takes its name. Clarke stated that he produced his film as a direct intervention
into the representation in the media of the sectarian violence that was taking place in Northern
Ireland at that time. His film, a forty minute television piece initially only broadcast locally in the
province, distils acts of sectarian murder into an anonymous repetition, or ritual, of brutal,
factical images: the approach, the murder, the dead. It encapsulates the modernist critical
interpretation of cinema as the self-reflexive construct, drawing attention to and interrupting the
flow of mass media and commodified images and narratives with the suspension of meaning and
narration itself. Van Sants film shares much of this technique but it also retains some distinct
stylistic differences from Clarkes film. Alan Clarke reduces the technique of repetition, rhythm
and stasis (with minimal, naturalistic sound) to a form of immanence, the ever-present occurrence
of violence that was in the background of daily life in Northern Ireland. Clarke described the
sectarian murder as the provinces elephant in the room (Boyle 1988). His film is a stripping
away of daily life to leave only the violence. The film delivers a brute and ever-present facticity
formed in relation to the very localised spatial arrangements of time, place and act. All figures,
both killers and victims, remain entirely anonymous. Elephant (1988) reduces the rhythms of
walking, killing, stasis-in-death to a constant repetition. Its only structural shift occurs in the final
sequence in which the constant repetition is disrupted as one of two men, seemingly both
executioners, becomes the executed as he is walked to his death, the killers having turned on
themselves. Amidst the bleak milieu of Clarkes film, something like a demand imposes itself, not
least, the demand for the form to break out of its own apparent feedback loop. As a formula, it is
reminiscent of the situation proposed by Schelling in his Ages of the World, in which the conditions
declare the necessity of a radical decision to break a deadlock. In Schellings proposition, the
Divine Being is trapped in the perpetual chaos of eternity. What it seeks is the decision (in the

133
beginning was the Word) that will fracture eternity and deliver a linear, historical time (see Zizek
1997: 14).
As in Alan Clarkes film, Elephant (2003) provides no roll-call of the dead. We are not
confronted with documented victims or survivors (as we are in Bowling for Columbine). The film is
expressly even-handed in its depiction of, and screen-time apportioned to, both victims and
killers. The film does, however, name some of its fictional characters via introductory captions
that also punctuate the sequential overlaps. This leads to certain other distinctions from Clarkes
approach. Van Sant considerably abstracts the films minimal parts. Lengthy sequence shots
incorporating diffuse focal lengths, an over-lapping temporal arrangement, intrusive, de-
realising slow-motion effects and a non-naturalistic soundtrack constantly undermine a strictly
naturalistic presentation of images, deferring to the inconclusive, the elusive, and incomplete.
There is little in Van Sants film that can be described as a lament, memorialisation or act
of mourning for those involved in the actual event of Columbine as is the case in certain recent
fictionalised re-presentations of historical and catastrophic events, such as United 93 (2006) or
World Trade Center (2006). Van Sants emphasis, then, of pathos over logos, in Rancires terms,
pushes the film away from an historical context towards an impressionistic, aesthetic one. Van
Sant has recalled in interview that Columbine was the starting point, and the key point of
reference for Elephant, citing scripts written by various collaborators and aborted in the
intervening years. The films development and production details a movement away from the
procedures of dramatic fiction to an improvisatory and impressionistic observation configured
within the topography of the films location and the characterisation of its non-professional cast. In
this more general sense, Elephant takes its place within a sequence of works beginning with Gerry
(2001) and moving on to Last Days (2005) and Paranoid Park (2008) in which Van Sant continues
the theme of young male violence (murder, suicide, accident respectively) and in the process hints
at the broader themes of fate, chance, grace, and the sublime.
A school shooting such as Columbine is charged with the desire to seek interpretation,
and in the absence of documented evidence (confessions by the killers, a clearly identifiable
forensic narrative of events something like Pasolinis multiple Zapruder films) the nature of the
inexplicable as a form of radical evil surfaces in the inflection of a certain kind of post-modern
sublime: the impossibility or unspeakability of interpretation for which the sublime functions as
an aesthetic conceptualisation that transgresses the limits of interpretation. The concept of the

134
sublime forms a more detailed discussion in later chapters. Here, it is simply worth noting that the
post-modern sublime collapses the monstrous into established laws: in its psychoanalytic reading
it becomes the Real that erupts from beneath the Symbolic, an always already morbid excess
within any symbolic order. Jean-Franois Lyotards more overtly aesthetic reading of the sublime
subverts the unifying criteria of Kants original sublime with an incompatability that collapses the
possibilities for human understanding via form and presentation: events are rendered
unthinkable or unpresentable and the aesthetic response is a recognition of the it happens
rather than the exposition of the what happens.
Jacques Rancire has examined Lyotards aesthetic sublime and concluded that it, in fact,
renegotiates a redemptive force as it reconfigures an end of art a state beyond art since it
generates a dissolution of the material means of art and its dialectical representation thereby
formulating a signature that is a fidelity to an original debt. Teleological, narrative or salvific
criteria are dissolved but a redemptive impetus remains as the formative reason of art (Rancire
2007: 136). This latter redemptive impetus derives from Lyotards reliance on certain avant-garde
artistic practices as the vital means to mark the limits of a capitalist, consumer society; a means to
disrupt the unity and totality of a (false) consensus. To this extent the aesthetic is political, the
sublime standing for an opposition for such consensus between object and idea and the refusal of
the signs of history to conform to narrative representation. Such a reading would appear to define
Elephant as a work operating in accord with this conception of the sublime. Criticism of this
reading of the sublime claims that the rupture of meaning leads only to an apophasis of the
monstrous that denies any ethical distinction between the ineffable and the transcendent, not
to a recognition of an ethical decision but only to a speechlessness (Kearney 2003: 88-89). In
terms of Elephants relation to the sublime and the instance of decision, it can be seen less as one of
opposition and the rupture of unity and dialectic synthesis and more as one of a deconstructive
form of indecision or undecidability; that is, not as a substantive or meaningful ground upon
which to propose a new politics of the sublime but as the production of an undecidability that is
the process of showing and withdrawing the terms of recognition. Van Sants Elephant gives itself
over to both suspense (anticipation of the known historical incident) and suspension (a
withholding of a definitive end and its ultimate incompleteness). It presents a constant rhythm that
fluctuates between the grounding and the groundlessness of any terms for understanding the

135
incident as it unfolds, withdrawing the terms of redemption through opposition that might be
implied in its equal denial of the traditional narrative or interpretative structures of meaning.
The film certainly confounds attempts to propose an oppositional meaning in the event,
such as that put forward in a recent book by Mark Ames, Going Postal (2007), in which the author
seeks to locate Columbine, along with all such high-school and workplace shootings (labelled rage
murders), into a politicised genealogy of slave rebellions and violent acts of protest and
emancipation from past eras of (American) history. The counter-argument to Ames overblown
collective mythology is the liberal-humanist critique that wishes to take each incident on its merits
as a case of individual pathology and therefore, to ignore the possibility of a systemic root of
violence that runs deeper than the actions of particular subjects. Devoid of a means to access the
psychology of the perpetrators, the focus shifts to that of fate or chance (the randomness of
victims, for instance) or the peculiarly contemporary (cinematic) theme of redemption in the
guise of violence as pay-back for unspecified or unlocated resentment an effective nihilism.
Such assessments are suggestive of the mediated rhetoric of tragedy. Terry Eagleton, discussing
forms of tragedy in literature and in life in Sweet Violence (2003), distinguishes between classical
(Aristotelian) or normative forms of tragedy, which could not countenance the actions or deaths
of villains as being tragic in any way a tragedy based on moral, instructive terms and what he
calls a certain strain of existentialist philosophy that sees all kinds of death as tragic through its
sombre, gloomy, even at times nihilistic mode of pessimism (Eagleton 2003, 9). This latter
context sums up the recent Estonian film The Class (2007), inspired by the Columbine tragedy
(Simon 2007) as Variety noted, that located a rationale for such an incident squarely in a drama of
bullying and revenge played out predominantly from the victim-cum-eventual-murderers point
of view.
After so many withdrawals of meaning, what remains of Elephant would seem to be mere
remains, a cinematic remainder after the actual historical event to which it refers. Furthermore,
since Elephant appears to conceal all interpretative faculties and to suspend its images of everyday
events as they are defiled by a single moment of violent rupture within a strategy of affectivity
over meaning, how can it be coupled to any currency of redemption?
It is worth recalling Gilles Deleuzes project to redeem the images of cinema and Jacques
Rancires observation that this amounts to the restitution of world images to themselves, or a
means of reclaiming a belief in this world through the historico-aesthetic rupture of the time-

136
image (Deleuze 2005b: 181). Deleuze sets out to define a semiotics of cinema as thought, thought
as image, such that he closes his two volumes with the observation that [c]inema itself is a new
practice of images and signs, whose theory philosophy must produce as conceptual practice
(Deleuze 2005b: 269). However, Jacques Rancire has argued that this is not a matter of
distinguishing between two types of cinematic sign or image the classical or modernist;
movement-image or time-image in all their variations but of respective points of view toward
the cinematic image. For Deleuze, it was a matter of locating cinematic images that returned the
viewing experience to one of thought and the construction of new concepts. In contrast, Rancire
claims that it is rather the apparatus of cinema and the cinematic image that has the potential to
thwart given meaning with an excess of sense-impressions. Each image is, in effect, the potential
site or limit situation of meaning. Rancieres formulation of contradictory images points towards
Jean-Luc Nancys concern with the image as an exposure of the real an always already sense
from the limit situation of signification. The orientation, or regard that Nancy identifies in the
cinema of Kiarostami stems from a particular selection by the film-maker: an orientation precisely
toward that which operates in excess of signification; precisely that which fails to make sense. The
orientation of looking of which Nancy writes (Nancy 2001) is a matter of delineating the excess,
or remainder, of cinematic images that draw attention, or expose, the withdrawal of meaning. In
that respect the real to which it attempts to pay attention is presented as a presentation. It is not
an accident that interrupts the frame (as Benjamin implies), nor a retrospective correction to a
real hidden beneath the ideological (as Godard implies). Nor is it the rupture, as interval or
broken link in a chain of articulation that gives onto a formless, chaotic real of matter-light (as
Deleuze implies). It is here that Deleuzes thesis seems to overshoot interpretation: cinema itself
becomes an instrument for the distribution of Deleuzes philosophical and conceptual project; the
act of violence and the means to respond is buried under the philosophers conceptual apparatus.
Yet, Elephant insists upon the form and rhythm of selective looking at the brief moments
of a violent rupture; a monstration that allows the condition of a situation to expose itself at the
same time as it is in excess of and shatters any encoded logic of interpretation. Elephant presents
the condition of dread, terror or anxiety as a felt experience: an exposure to the senses of the
terms of what has passed and may occur again. The distinction between Nancys position and that
of Deleuze, who also proclaims an outside (Deleuze 2005b: 170) that suggests something similar
to Nancys configuration of sense, comes down to a shift of orientation from the attempt to

137
identify a specific image of thought (Deleuze) to a sense derived from the cinematic image that
exposes the incompatibility, or undecidability, of the available modes of discourse (Nancy). In
short, Nancy proposes not a typology of image and meaning but the delineation of the limit
situation of meaning. It configures a relation between film, viewer and world that, as Laura
McMahon has recently noted, can thus be read in terms of an interruptive continguity, a contact-
in-separation (McMahon 2010: 77). Cinemas giving of evidence re-works Heideggers account
of art and technology as revealing and concealing: he used the term aletheia. This intersection of
aletheia, evidence and the real thus allows Nancy to redeem realism from the regimes of
representation, indexicality and identification, untying cinema from the various theoretical and
philosophical traditions which seek to enshrine it (McMahon 2010: 78).
Here we have Nancys artwork as the locus of a transimmanent expression of sense in
which the material and the transcendent, the real and the representational, are mutually
interruptive. As McMahon notes, opening onto this mode of mutual interruption, here cinema
restates itself in its relation to the sense of the world its truths embedded in the evident, the
material, the real (McMahon 2010: 82).
McMahon relates this transimmanence to a commentary Nancy wrote on the subject of
Claire Deniss film Beau Travail (1999) in which Nancy argues that the image makes of itself an
icon, an image which itself gives birth to the presence it represents (in McMahon 2010: 82).
McMahon points out that, in its original religious sense, the icon symbolises something beyond
itself through resemblance or association. However, in Nancys argument, the cinematic image, as
iconic presence, becomes an image that does not represent anything other than itself (McMahon
2010: 83). Therefore, much as Nancy, in a meditation on religious paintings of Noli me tangere,
had sought to extend the characteristics of the image of the resurrection to a non-religious
presentation, as a withdrawal of symbol and meaning, so too, with regard to Beau Travail, does he
formulate an a-religious, non-representational sense of the cinematic image that, at the same
time, acknowledges a debt to the religious and representational contexts in which the limited
terms of meaning are embedded (McMahon 2010: 83).
It is here then, that we might finally begin to present a case for Elephant that is
characterised by a short footnote in Nancys book on Kiarostami:

138
In each instance one deals with a cinema opening onto its own image as onto something
real or meaningful that can only be taken by images, aiming from somewhere beyond
any point of view, with a look devoid of subjectivity, with a lens that would aim for life
from the vantage point of the secret of death as the secret of something evident (Nancy
2001: 52).

Elephant presents the sense of a felt contact with the conditions of dread, fear of trembling at
the event and the responsibility it encapsulates. In short, it is a sense of the aporetics of decision at
the heart of all responsibility for the event. Whether it is the unfathomable decision of the killers
to act and the incomprehensible, inconclusive demand for the decision of judgement, justice or
retribution that such an event provokes both present the tension of necessity, its imminence,
stripped of the release of that tension. In passing, we can recall Derridas highlighting of the
secret at the heart of absolute responsibility that he extracts from a reading of Kierkegaards Fear
and Trembling, that first locates the origin of trembling in an event or decision; that which occurs
in anticipation of the event or decision that has immediately passed and yet could come again.
Derrida writes, [a]s different as dread, fear, anxiety, terror, panic, or anguish remain from one
another, they have already begun in the trembling, and what has provoked them continues or
threatens to continue, to make us tremble (Derrida 1996: 54).
Yet crucially, in Nancys non-representational real, this trembling is devoid of
subjectivity; the camera presents a pure icon of presence. A close examination of a short sequence
from near the end of Elephant highlights the tension at work in Van Sants meticulous shot
construction. Towards the end of the killers rampage (one hour and ten minutes into the film)
are the following two shots: the first lasts one minute and twenty-two seconds; the second three
minutes and six seconds. Each is a continuous Steadicam track. The frame is fixed on a short focal
length with one of the killers, Alex, composed in medium shot. Alex is in focus; an absence of
depth of field throws all of the middle and background distance out of focus, effectively setting a
focal plane in the foreground that is only apparent when a body or object intersects with it.
The first shot is a reverse track facing Alex as he shoots, strides down a corridor, then
reloads. As he reloads, the camera continues to circle him, turning a reverse track into a forward
track, now following Alex. All the time, only Alex is in focus, all other elements of the frame are
soft: an impressionistic blur emphasised by the soundtrack that combines a realist diegetic the

139
empty, echoing corridors, the distant voices with a non-diegetic overlay of bird song, bells,
gurgling water, electronic pulses.
There is a cut to an entirely blurred frame of a corridor: two figures run towards the
camera, coming into focus, revealed as two students, Carrie and Nathan. The blurred silhouette of
Alex passes in the background. Carrie and Nathan exit the frame, which holds, blurred again as
this time, Alex emerges from soft into sharp focus. Once Alex has come into focus the camera
latches onto him, panning as he enters the silent, disrupted canteen and sits at a table, the body of
a cook lying, slightly out of focus, in the background. The voice of Eric, the other killer,
interrupts the stillness from off-screen. The camera whip-pans to frame Eric; he is now in focus,
the focal point. He talks garrulously: a sudden off-screen gunshot, Eric crumples, leaving a
blurred frame that is an exact reprise of that of the corridor through which both Carrie and
Nathan, and Alex, have moved. Alex now re-enters frame, the shot still continuous. Again the
focal point, the camera remains locked on Alex, tracking him through the kitchen as he follows a
noise until he discovers Carrie and Nathan hiding in a walk-in refrigerator. The camera pauses on
the three figures, now all in focus, then gradually reverse tracks away as Alex utters the films
final words, the child-rhyme eeny-meeny-miny-mo as his figure loses focus in the frame.
The core of this four and a half minutes, and two shots, of Elephant is its focal plane, a
point that is concealed until a body interrupts it, comes into contact with it, and reveals itself.
This plane is devoid of subject; it is interchangeable. It remains a withdrawn but ever present
presence and tension within the frame that is otherwise an impressionistic, indistinct image
without clarity. Shock, suspense, empathy and incomprehensibility intersect sporadically across
this focal plane in the faces and bodies of Alex, Eric, Carrie and Nathan. It opens onto the
expressive and affective sense of exposure; an evidence of the real of such an event without
representational terms of its management or containment. The tension of the event spills over
constantly into the blurred topography of the school.
It is this framing, fluctuating focal plane, the flowing continuous shot without the order of
dialectic cutting or synthesis, that separates the iconic presence of Elephants sequential images
from the terms of the symbolic images that Ricoeur associated with the trembling or dread of
defilement. Elephant depicts the defilement of the norm, a high school, and the suffering of those
innocent staff and students fleetingly seen to be shot down. As an event, the shooting is, by any
standards a defilement, a sin. Without the traditional discourse of judgement, however, Elephant

140
leaves us adrift. The film collapses together Ricoeurs progressive hermeneutics of symbolic
order: in defilement I accuse another, in sin I am accused, in guilt I accuse myself (Simms 2003:
23). The order has escaped us: we can accuse others, we can try to conceive the event in broader
human terms, we can even wonder at our own complicity.
However, Nancys mode of interpretation frees us from Ricoeurs need to re-inscribe
these stages back into a traditional, religiously inflected hermeneutics of meaning. There is no
need for the terms and necessary articulations of sin and guilt that underpins the history of
salvation. If sin is the emergence of self-awareness (the knowledge of good and evil) and salvation
(which is not the expiation of a misdeed but the redemption of the person who has sinned) is the
opening of the self to the grace of God, then, as Nancy suggests in Dis-Enclosure, we should look
not at the self but at the opening of the self to the other (Nancy 2008b: 156). To that extent, God
is an auto-affection, presenting the self to the self. Or put yet another way, it is the opening of
sense, the Open of proclamation (Nancy 2008b: 156). That which for Ricoeur is a confession,
dependent on subjectivity and a system of symbols, is re-inscribed by Nancy as an affective
opening onto sense; an a-religious proclamation of the real as it is exposed.
There is one further manoeuvre that Nancy makes elsewhere that bears on Elephants
cinematic image and the tension and trembling it evokes. In an essay entitled The Image-The
Distinct, in The Ground of the Image, Nancy refers to the self-coincidence of the image. Again it is
the image in excess of signification, that which excludes its conformity to a perceived object or to
a coded sentiment or well-defined function (Nancy 2005: 10). The image is the distension of a
present of intensity (Nancy 2005, 10). Nancy adopts the term methexis by which the intensity of
the images withdrawal and excess creates a participation or a contagion through which the image
seizes us (Nancy 2005: 9). Referring to painting, Nancy charts the tension, the methexis, of the
image of the nude its attraction and retreat that opens onto the limit situation of the erotic and
the pornographic. Such a methexis, the contagion, that which grips us with tension in the image, is
present in the terms of violence exposed in Elephant. Ginette Michaud writes of Nancys use of
methexis, giving an emphasis that ties it to the ethical the demand conjured from the intensity of
the image prior to, or in excess of, the political or religious:

It is not about entertainment or becoming-cultural, but about the fact that art in front of
us and within us opens up and works on the question of the world, and that this other

141
concept of the political that requires examination and rigorous analysis transcends any
science of government or of public law. To think ex nihilo, with no preconceptions, with
no model, is what art has always done: it is the reason surpassing reason itself that
should commit us to passing through it in order to ponder the coexistence and the conflict
of a world of bodies, a world of senses, a world of the being-in-the-world (Michaud
2005: 122).

If such an interpretation of Elephant fails to provide any terms for understanding or dealing with
the violence and suffering it depicts, that is ultimately to prescribe too great a demand on a work
of cinema. As Nancy also argues, [a]rt is not a simulacrum or an apotropaic that would protect us
from unjustifiable violence (Nancy 2005: 26). Elephants suspension in the midst of the intensity
of indecision is an imminence suspended infinitely over itself and over ourselves. As an artwork,
or a work of the cinema, Elephant may not pose any solutions to world events, only the enigma of
the world itself. But this is, precisely, the cinema that has emerged in the wake of the collapse of
political certainties in the present era. The closeness with which a few directors have produced
works that mirror the conceptual concerns of philosophy of Derrida, of Nancy points to a
cinema that, first and foremost, is engaging with the world rather than with the tired images and
symbols of representational tradition, an a-religious confession of violent and destructive
experience.

142
CHAPTER 6

Defilement: Flanders

Paul Virilio has argued that the logic of war and the logic of vision and the cinema are derived
from the same source; that perception and destruction are inescapably interlinked within a
geometrification of looking. Both ostensibly operate systems of taking aim. He notes how this
technical alignment used to be known, to the French at least, as the faith line and how this
faith, in looking, has been replaced by the obliviousness of the modern, remote, technologies
of war. In short, an ethics of sorts, of the antiquated relation of sighting that linked adversaries in
heroic, life and death contact, with its prominence of mortality, has been steadily erased. Instead,
it is replaced with the techno-optics and the synthetic image of the representation or modelling
of conflict in which seeing is omnipotent yet estranged from the real, despite the accelerated and
exponential expansion of its destructive capabilities (Virilio 1989). He cites the pioneering French
film director, Abel Gance, in respect of this shift in emphasis from the real to the representational:
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter the Hell of Images (in Virilio 1989: 31).
Whilst this chapter makes no attempt to validate or otherwise Virilios particular and
provocative genealogy of the twin technologies of war and cinema, it does retain one aspect of that
genealogy: the reflection of the real in relation to the cinemas depiction of war; its sighting and
its representation of the most extreme form of human violence and conflict.
It begins and ends with Bruno Dumonts 2007 film Flanders, since, it will be argued, this
film eschews the narrative and representational codes that traditionally configure the expression
war in the cinema the war film as genre and face, directly, the obscuring of the clarity of wars
aims (so many visions of truth, justice or injustice in war) to present the landscape of war as
a form of sense. This particular sense is the uncanniness of war as the hidden inscription of
violence in place of the narrative transformations of war. Avoiding the religious condemnation
that is the Hell of images, it turns on something like a reinscribed faith line a looking that
returns the image as the measure of imminence and the threat of war: a conditional real that is
the legacy and the prophecy of so many theological or political signs. Finally, it is the interruption
of so many representational symbols of war through the opening of a space that is, literally, the

143
landscape of war where landscape in terms we can again derive from Nancy is the opening
step, the measure of the picture that precedes and exceeds particular meanings (Nancy 2005:
62).
It also unravels Ricoeurs symbolic movement from defilement through sin to guilt that
has marked the development of the war film in recent years, to return the cinematic condition of
war to something like the originary defilement or stain. These terms, as they have been mirrored
and encoded into the war genre, have been rendered through mythic and narrative structures that
articulate motifs and symbols of destiny and redemption, and the glorification of the body in war.
Such motifs are also tied to the images of suffering, of death and transfiguration, the just war and
war as hell to the most recent formula for guilt, the war crime and atrocity.
The images of the war film are equally integrated into aspects of truth and fiction,
from the experience of conflict, through the presentation of the enemy and the reasons for war, to
the factual accounting of conflict and its crimes. These images operate extensively around the
spectacular and the cinemas ability to combine photographic verisimilitude with a deceptively
realistic illusion. The cinema has proved itself perfectly placed to technically render realistic
depictions of the combat experience. This has led to a heightened tension between the
documentary realism of the image and the mythic and paradigmatic structures its narratives assert.
The four examples below are chosen to draw attention to the particular relationship
between the realistic and the mythic since each derives from source material based in eye-
witness accounts: Francis Coppolas Apocalypse Now (1979) drew on Michael Herrs reportage
accounts of the Vietnam War, published as Dispatches; Elim Klimovs Come and See (1984) drew on
oral and written testimonies of Nazi atrocities in Byelorussia during World War II that were
collected and assembled by the films writer, Ales Adamovich; Terrence Malicks The Thin Red
Line (1998) is adapted from the novel by Pacific War veteran James Jones; whilst Brian De Palmas
Redacted (2008) is based on an historically documented war crime and assembles around it images
drawn from reportage, internet traffic, and the personal videos of troops serving in the conflict in
Iraq. These films will act as navigational markers through Ricoeurs symbolic configuration and
their particular use of symbolic structures serves to demonstrate how aspects of the war film are
integrated with long-standing mythic, metaphysical and anthropological accounts of the rupture of
human conflict that recall Ricoeurs phases of evil. More than that, however, their recourse to
the written word as the authentic voice of conflict experience reiterates the point made in the

144
previous chapter regarding Elephant: that of the very failure of words under conditions of violence
and the image, the hell of images as the remainder of a sense of war outside the judgements of
spectacle or authenticity. Here Bruno Dumonts Flanders testifies to the interruption of those
mythic paradigms with the images as its remainder. It retains the symbols of defilement but
suspends the signs of lamentation, recovery, or redemption that instigate Ricoeurs
hermeneutic procedure. Flanders, then, following Jean-Luc Nancy, presents an hiatus in the
narrative and destinal motifs of war, the glorification of the body in war, and the words that give
war meaning. It opens a space onto the legacy of war as a stain, a mark in the exteriority of
landscape and history and on the interiority of the subject, that is not particular or individual but
conditional; again, as a sense that opens onto the present limits of the ordinary and the
unmarked. Rather than attempting to transform the experience of war, Flanders positions the locus
of conflict as the hidden inscription in the landscape.
Flanders opens with the stillness of a farmyard in winter, cold and damp. Slowly,
gradually, through a sequence of lengthy, static shots we are introduced to Demester, a young
farmer, the surrounding countryside, and Barbe, a girl from the village. She asks him if he has
received his letter. He is to leave on Monday. They have sex in a hedgerow. Drink beer with some
friends. On Monday, Demester goes to war.
In opposition to the closure of meaning, of images given over to the words to voice-
over, to the authentication by testimony it instead opens a single word out into landscape: the
image and what it conjures spills out of the single word, the films title fixes this place, its
landscape, to the region that is by name a memorialisation of the carnage of the First World
War and its Western Front. Between the films title and the contemporary landscape depicted is a
near century of war. But Flanders shows us nothing of the old war, the war to end all wars. It
shows only desolate fields emptied of livestock, as if nothing could survive here though it clearly
must, since Demester, the hunter, sets snares in the woods. And it shows another war, a present
war of sorts; one that takes place on foreign (non-European) soil, in parched and barren desert.
The war in Flanders clearly resounds with its historical present, beyond the world of the film, to
the real world with its conflicts in the heat and dust of Iraq and Afghanistan, in any of their
phases since the First Gulf War of 1990-91. The image of columns of black smoke on the horizon
remind us most clearly of that particular war, as documented in Lessons of Darkness (1992), and
represented in Jarhead (2005), but nowhere are these conflicts mentioned by name. Rather, the

145
films battle images are impressionistic, as much the images derived from war in the cinema, with
only some assistance from historical photographs or the images of nightly television news. This is
marked by anachronisms: the modern-clad soldiers in Kevlar body armour, shouldering assault
rifles, filing through trenches and riding horses behind the tanks. There are echoes of the Great
War too, in what little concern for a modern professional military the film offers us: instead, like
the old pals brigades, Demester and his comrades are conscripted from their village, collected
in a truck, and sent to fight side by side in the same unit. There they proceed through the familiar
episodes of modern war: colleagues are blown to pieces by landmines and shot dead by unseen
guerrilla enemies. When they make their own first kill they find they have shot mere children,
albeit child-soldiers wielding Kalashnikovs. They gang rape a woman, only to have that same
woman exact judgement when they are captured. One of their number is then castrated and
executed notably the single man among them who did not physically participate in the rape, no
doubt to consign the perpetrators to damnation twice over, to live, if they survive, with both the
guilt of the rape and the death of their comrade. Though it may also serve as a provocative
warning to those who look directly upon atrocity but refuse to protest.
Thereafter, the remaining two, Demester and Blondel the rival for the affections of
Barbe back home escape, only for Blondel to be shot down in the process with Demester forced
to leave him behind for reasons or motives that remain ambiguous. Blondel may or may not have
been a rival for Barbe. She makes love to Blondel in an act of provocation toward Demester after
he fails to confirm they are a couple in front of friends. Barbe discovers herself to be pregnant by
him and has an abortion. She continues to have casual sexual relations during Demester and
Blondels absence, at the same time seemingly descending into depression. Eventually she is
committed to a psychiatric hospital after suffering violent, hysterical outbursts. Her condition
appears allusively linked to the experiences of the men abroad in conflict; a strangely mystical
descent into madness that mirrors the mens descent into the bloodied violence of combat. On
Demesters return she accuses him of abandoning Blondel, an accusation he admits. Barbe claims
I was there. I know what you did! All that Demester can offer is that It was hell out there. It is
unclear if this is the hell of war or the hell of the images of war.
There is a sense, in Barbes apparent revelations, that Gances dire warning has come
true. There is no destiny or glory in the figure of the soldier, or in the act of war anymore.
Demester does not return a hero. He cannot, since the modern war is always now a media war,

146
and every action, every atrocity or blunder occurs in the glaring light of a global media. Perhaps
Barbe already knows because, like us, she has seen it all already. The war in Flanders is a composite
of the images of a century of wars, from the opening trenches to the closing helicopter medivac
from Jaccuse (1919) to Black Hawk Down (2001). For Demester, the soldier, wars havent
changed so much in a century. They are still some kind of hell, a sensory and sensuous experience
of terror and elation, just as Ernst Jnger described an accentuation of details that overwhelms
and therefore blocks out, in its immediacy, the discursive or conceptual terms of war. The
moment is the condition of things. Only the world has changed around the soldier so that wars are
most clearly, consciously felt not as actual but as virtual experiences, remotely, at home.
Demester returns alone from his nameless conflict to be judged for his actions. This is a stark
reversal of the soldiers from Gances Jaccuse who rise up from their deaths and return to their
village to pass judgement on the living and to demand to know if their sacrifice has been in vain. It
may well be that Jaccuse and Flanders are the bookends to a century of wars and war films that
follow the war to end all wars. There is a certain symmetry between them.
Both retain a mnage trois at their centre. At the core of Jaccuse is a romantic melodrama,
very much of its time: a young woman, Edith, is married to the insensitive, brutal Laurin
country squire and hunter. She has a lover, the poet, Jean Diaz, who composes pastoral odes that
he reads to his mother. Much like Demester, Laurin is unable to articulate his true feelings for
her. So much so that he resorts to a crude physicality in the bedroom that amounts to rape.
Though rape is only explicitly described as such later when Edith is the victim of the enemy, the
Germans being depicted through expressionistic, spike-helmeted shadows looming over her
cowering figure. Atrocity is clearly defined as the act of a faceless enemy. After which she
disappears, sending a letter that claims she has been imprisoned. She returns, however, shortly
before the end of the war with an infant in tow. Such a revelation is enough to drive her father to
leave, unable to face a grandchild begotten in such a fashion. Laurin too, when he finally finds out
about the child hidden in the care of Diaz admits he would have killed the child had he known
of its existence. So much for melodrama in an age when a raped woman could be thought to have
sinned.
The rape that occurs in Flanders, as in other recent depictions in war, encapsulates the
centurys shift from a shorthand, propagandist indictment of a monstrous enemy to the locus of
the wretched, de-humanising effects of warfare on the mentality and morals of ones own side.

147
Rape as revenge occurs in Brian de Palmas recent Redacted, derived from a notorious incident that
took place in the ongoing conflict in Iraq. There it serves also to motivate internecine rifts of class
and social demography in the enclosed military structure a fragmentation of the camaraderie
myth that began to collapse amidst the chaos and vituperation of Vietnam.
The rape as it occurs in Jaccuse remains very much a part of the films opening reels, part-
melodrama, part-propaganda: the lengthier but much less remarkable section of the film that has
been surpassed in film history by the deservedly remembered final sequence in which the dead rise
up to demand judgement on their sacrifice, famously given an additional poignancy by the
subsequent knowledge that so many of the soldiers playing the dead returned to the trenches only
to die for real in the final weeks of the war. Jay Winter has described Gances film in detail,
noting how these earlier reels remain very much a part of the wider cultural practice of the images
dEpinal, artworks produced for mass consumption that drew on popular, religious and even
erotic sources to produce mythologising works that blended patriotism, sentimentality and
propaganda (Winter 1998: 127). Winter goes on to describe how the final parts of Gances film,
however, make a radical leap into an altogether more visionary mode. Winter charts the four
accusations at the heart of the film: the first at the German soldiers for the rape of his lover Edith;
the second, at the German nation for causing a war that kills his mother. The war takes its toll.
Laurin is mortally wounded and Diaz is driven insane. From his hospital bed he receives visions of
the dead and returns to his village accusing the civilian population of venality and moral weakness,
besmirching the trust and honour of the soldiers at war. Here the dead return to pass judgement
on the living who have been seen swindling the soldiers money and sleeping with their wives.
The living are shocked into righteousness. But after this revelation, Diazs madness is beyond help
and he dies with a final accusation directed at the indifference of nature to human suffering,
collapsing after raging at the sun. It is in the sudden change of register in the third reel that Gance
elevates his film from the generic banality of the themes of love and jealousy amid enemy atrocity
to a fully mythical, and Christological, emphasis on resurrection, redemption, death and sacrifice.
Apocalyptic, or the religiosity of condemnation, is given its most literal realisation in Rex
Ingrams 1920 film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Transplanting a story of family rivalry from
Argentina (in Blasco Ibnezs original novel) to Paris, it tells of two sisters who marry a
Frenchman and a German respectively, right on the eve of war. Again, like Jaccuse, the initial
melodrama is given a radical, eternal twist by the introduction of a family friend, Tchernoff, a

148
Russian mystic who punctuates the film with his dire apocalyptic warnings lifted from Biblical
Revelation and aided by visionary special effects (four Drer inspired Horsemen of the Apocalypse
riding through the clouds). Its dogmatic Biblical message is fully realised as the film closes with the
caption: Peace has come but the Four Horsemen will still ravage humanity stirring unrest in
the world until all hatred is dead and only love reigns in the heart of mankind (in Winter 1998:
140).
Such Biblical rhetoric marks, as Anson Rabinbach suggests, the key thematic that
distinguishes the aesthetic responses to the First World War from those of the Second: [t]o put it
in a convenient formula, World War I gave rise to reflections on death and transfiguration, World
War II to reflections on evil, or on how the logic of modernity since the Enlightenment, with its
legacy of progress, secularism, and rationalism, could not be exculpated from events that seemed
to violate its ideals (Rabinbach 1997: 9).
Alain Badiou has raised the stakes of the Christological emphasis in response to the Great
War, claiming its inevitability on account of the Western worlds Christian orientation and the
violence, crucifixion and redemption of the Son of God in the order of Christian state power:
How can we recover from such an inception? How can we move beyond the absolute violence of
that commencement? (Badiou 2007: 29). This he finds to be, in something of an end of history
formula, the defining crisis of the 20th century.
Badiou claims it is what comes to define the war to end all wars. The dominant idea
after the conflict of 1914-18 was that such butchery could only lead to the end of all wars, to a
definitive peace (Badiou 2007: 30). However, this is only one half of the equation. Underlying
the consequence of such catastrophic violence as that of the First World War is the question of a
superior violence. Such is the apocalyptic pronouncement: that such bad violence must be
overcome by a superior, essential violence. Within this Christological double-bind, then, [t]hese
two paths intertwine and confront one another, especially between 1918 and 1939. What dialectic
is instituted by a bellicose inception? Is it the war/peace dialectic or the dialectic of good war/bad
war, just war/unjust war? (Badiou 2007: 30). Answering himself, Badiou finds the historical
evidence in the Ptainism of inter-war French politics, the path of the never again. By contrast,
Nazi Germany sought the latter, a good war; an imperial, national and racial war (Badiou 2007,
30). What, he asks, in this historical sequence, has become of the Christly promise of a new
man? (Badiou 2007: 31) and responds with a Nietzschean formula: the century is split between a

149
passive nihilism of renunciation, resignation, (the lesser evil) and the other, Soviet, century
(1917-1980s) inherits the active nihilism of a break with history (Badiou 2007: 31).
Twentieth-century history becomes an essential disjunction, an entanglement that is not a
dialectic since it is an irresolvable struggle but gives on to a particular violence. It is a violence that
is not merely objective but also subjective: Violence takes place at the point of disjunction; it
substitutes itself for a missing conjunction (Badiou 2007: 32). In the Godless century the new
man is bound up with destiny, and it is destiny that makes past humanity nothing but disposable
material (Badiou 2007: 32). From the inside of such a destinal programme, which Badiou calls
by the equivocal name of communism, barbarism becomes one with necessity, politics and
morality are re-written under the signs of the epic and the heroic (Badiou 2007: 33). He draws
parallels with the Iliad an uninterrupted succession of massacres but a narrative, that is,
nevertheless, read without regard for the objective signs of cruelty, but as epic and heroic: the
force of the action overrides in its intensity any moral squeamishness (Badiou 2007: 33). The
subjectivity of war, distinct from the objectivity of its events, catastrophes, violence or atrocity,
resides in the aestheticism of the epic feeling; the struggle for a new beginning (Badiou 2007:
33). Inscribed into Badious axiomatic method, this same relation of destruction to the newly
definitive is equally recognisable within the projects and manifestos of modernist art.
Badiou distinguishes this subjectivity from the Hegelian (Napoleonic) sense of war as a
constitutive moment in national consciousness. The twentieth centurys extension of conflict to a
global scale only serves to further emphasise the impossibility of an end, a totalisation or unity of
the victorious. Destruction is managed, on the one hand, by the beauty of victorious heroism
(Badiou 2007: 36), on the other, by justification in battle. Conflict from World War Two
onwards becomes war as an absolute cause that generates a new type of subject; a war that is also
the creation of its combatant. In the end, war becomes a subjective paradigm. This paradigm, in
Badious axiomatic method, resides in the concept of the Two neither One (the unifying
power of God) nor the Multiple (a harmony or balance of powers). Rather, it is a case of a
subjectivity of decision. War is omnipresent in the 20th century because it is the subjectivity of an
anti-dialectical decision, an either/or (Badiou 2007: 37).
Despite Badious own personal antipathy to the deconstructive concerns of
undecidability, the 21st centurys movement beyond this subjectivity of the Two and the
reconfiguration of subjectivity to that evidenced by, as Nancy suggests, a being-outside-itself, an

150
exteriority, comes to the fore (in James 2006: 63). Flanders points towards an exteriority, to a
landscape beyond and before the subjective criteria of its protagonists, and toward an irreducible
state of sense present but prior to the orders of the symbolic. The landscape is the state or place
of war before it is its meaning.
Colin MacCabe charts the beginnings of this breakdown of the logic of decision in more
succinctly generic characteristics than Badious abstracted formula. He argues, in a review written
on the release of Terrence Malicks The Thin Red Line, that the idea of individual martial heroism
so crucial to western culture from Homer to Shakespeare shifted in the latter half of the
twentieth century to that of a democratic heroism in which the citizen army, crossing class and
social standing, becomes the locus for the collective resistance to a designated enemy (MacCabe
1999: 12). McCabes comments coincide with an apogee in what Badiou would doubtless cite as
the restoration in cinema: a return to the subject of World War Two in terms of restitution and
commemoration evidenced by Steven Spielbergs Saving Private Ryan (1998) and subsequently its
spectacular television follow-up, Band of Brothers (2001). Spielbergs film indulges in the
sentimental prologue and epilogue of a veterans graveside memory as a means to proclaim
relevance to audiences too young to feel the memorial gravitas of the Second World War. As
MacCabe notes, the films shift of emphasis from the struggle against fascism to the central plot
of locating the last remaining brother of the Ryan family only serves to demonstrate how far
history has moved on from the original conflict (MacCabe 1999: 14). Terrence Malicks film
operates within a very different framework, reflecting war as all-encompassing event, a mythic
formula that presents an alternative strain of war film with a line of descent stemming from the
apocalyptic aspects of the earliest films of Gance and Ingram, rather than from their
melodramatics.
The shift from themes of death, sacrifice and transfiguration that followed the First World
War to that of camaraderie occurred in isolated instances before 1939, especially in pacifist
oriented proclamations such as Lewis Milestones All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), although as
Jay Winter notes, this film has something of an American New World persuasion, imploring
Old World nations to break down their enmities (Winter 1998: 132). Nevertheless, this film
was one of very few to adopt such thematics. As MacCabe states, it was the Second World War
that gave the greatest impetus to such themes, particularly in the decades from the 1940s to the

151
1960s in which the justness of the cause was still very much to the fore. In the West, it was
Vietnam that put an end to that narrative simplicity.
MacCabe records that until Vietnam the US military had retained racially segregated
units. Not only did the unpopularity of the Vietnam conflict within significant proportions of the
American public undermine the justness of the war as it came to be represented in films,
particularly in the 1970s and 80s, but the appearance of racial and class issues within the military
reflected those same issues as they came to a destabilising prominence within American society
(MacCabe 1999: 14). Dominant American cinema did not, of course, do away with the certainties
of traditional genre in its depiction of the conflict in Vietnam but a broader and more critical
range of narratives began to appear. The loss of the justness, the certitude of moral ground for
conflict, is the key aspect of post-Vietnam cinema, even if it only focuses on the military mentality
in Stanley Kubricks Full Metal Jacket (1987), or on the treatment of veterans in Oliver Stones
Born on the Fourth of July (1989). War films that focus on the de-humanising elements of military
experience or the suffering and moral transgression of the military situation continue to the
present. As well as Redacted, Nick Broomfields Battle for Haditha (2007) recreates the inhuman
atrocities of the military situation, again drawn from a documented case.
What MacCabe finds problematic in Malicks film is the return to the undivided army,
or common soldiery, and that the subject of war and the scene of battle is treated in something
like a mythic or eternal sense. Therefore, MacCabe argues, it refuses the conditions of history and
the present that should make a war film pertinent.
The dichotomy between the historical and the mythopoeic cuts to the heart of the
aesthetic response to war and its violence. The examples of Apocalypse Now, Come and See, The Thin
Red Line, and Redacted offer a brief plotting of the recourse to myth and the symbolic as a means to
frame the raw data of historical testimony. Indeed, these examples are chosen not to be definitive
but simply to illustrate the movement from defilement to guilt, in Ricoeurs terms, that the
mythic/symbolic undergoes within the war genre. Moreover, each film treats the landscape of
war as, itself, a mythopoeic element within its signifying formula. But it is the movement between
the mythic and the realistic that will lead back to Bruno Dumonts Flanders, which, it will be
argued, presents an interruption of myth as a means to renegotiate the present in terms of
conflict, of sense as the non-representational real of experience; a turning away from war as
destiny and an exteriority of an irreducible subjectivity.

152
MacCabe recalls that Samuel Fuller, director of several war movies and a WWII veteran,
once stated that it was impossible to show the true horrors of modern warfare since the sheer
bloody human carnage it creates would be impossible for any audience to watch (MacCabe 1999:
13). As a means to eschew the Lyotardian formula of the unpresentable it may already be
necessary to reconfigure the real away from its mnemonic trace to its sense of dread.
Ricoeurs development of defilement, sin and guilt has been reinscribed into the
equivalent terms of the mythological, scriptural, metaphysical and anthropological by Richard
Kearney. He has developed these terms in a similar hermeneutic recovery of meaning in response
to the question of a radical evil at the heart of the postmodern sublime, or, as Kearney notes,
the impossibility of descriptive terms for the horror or monstrousness that transgress the limits of
representation (Kearney 2003: 88). Apocalypse Now, Come and See, The Thin Red Line, and Redacted,
can be seen to conform to each of Kearneys categories respectively. At the same time, they also
each frame the glorification of the body and the question of human fate or destiny and set out their
narratives within the movement of a journey through a specific landscape.
Francis Coppolas famous film of the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now represents the case of
the mythological, a point telegraphed within the film itself, given in the glimpse of Sir James
Frazers The Golden Bough amongst Colonel Kurtzs reading matter. Briefly, the films fateful
protagonist, Captain Willard, is ordered by the higher agency of military command to terminate
the scapegoat, the renegade Colonel Kurtz, who has, to all intents and purposes, relinquished
subservience to the American governments war aims to pursue the fight with the freedom of his
own initiative. Willards journey, one of fate and destiny, merely throws him from one
catastrophe to the next. A pattern takes shape, a series of ever more lurid, chaotic and repulsive
situations unfold, ever more extreme and increasingly dislocating Willard from his own senses and
his own sense of who he is and the logic and integrity of his mission. In the chaos of war innocent
Vietnamese are massacred on a boat; a riot ensues as bunny girls descend from helicopters; later,
at the Do Lung bridge a leaderless contingent of traumatised, drug-hallucinating soldiers fire
indiscriminately and hopelessly at a unseen enemy. In every incident all actors are mere pawns in
the larger scheme of war. Origins and ends give way to an eternal chaos the apocalypse now.
War, here, is also strictly the preserve of humankind. The films journey, its torturous
path, remains a constant relation and occupation of people. The landscape of war is the continuous
presence of the actions and debris of battle. The mystery of the dense jungle, for instance, is

153
always defiled by the wreck of a crashed B-52 bomber or the unexpected eruption of arrows from
unseen but still present indigenous Indians. Indeed, in a scene re-installed to the later Redux
edition (2000), a thick river fog serves only to reveal the presence of a French colonial family.
When the landscape is framed in itself, devoid of the occupancy of war, it is subjected to the
horror of burning, as perhaps befits a conflict that gave full vent to the strategy of defoliation. It
is this image that launches the film as both memory and flash-forward to the images voiced by
Willard in his opening speech. This image of a sheet of fire, itself like a screen, alludes to the
films overall treatment of the surface images of war, the hell or horror of the images of war.
Recalling the terms of Ricoeurs defilement, the war itself presents a contamination,
sublimated into the movement of doubling that drives the film; of Willards loss of his own self
and increasingly becoming Kurtz. The removal of this defilement and the return to a cosmological
purity, or in the real-politic terms of the Vietnam conflict, a return to order through facing the
enemy and the demand for punishment that it confirmed in the sacrifice of the scapegoat. This is
played out in the face to face meeting of Willard and Kurtz that leads to Kurtzs murder, famously
cross-cut with the indigenous Indians sacrificial killing of a water buffalo. Likewise, this same
cosmological structure of fate and destiny, of the contingency of Willards destiny as the whim of
divine necessity the logic of war or the abstract logic of the higher military command, is a re-
inscription of Kearneys mythological structure derived from the cycles of origin and rebirth that
also applies to the fate of bodies and the deification of the new after the death of the old. This
latter manifests itself in Willards emergence from the cave after killing Kurtz, as Kurtzs replica.
Finally, in a further relation to Ricoeurs mythic criteria, it should be stressed that the story is
recounted by Willard in voice over, his journey told after the fact as testimony. Despite the visual
spectacle of the films images, it is structurally related to the order of narrative, of the told rather
than the seen.
Elim Klimovs film Come and See moves the structure into the realm of sin. We should
recall that sin, in Ricoeurs terms, is the initial occasion of the realisation of a turning away from
the concept of God. A recognition of a relation to the divine is initiated by the films title, a
reference to the Biblical apocalyptic of Revelation and the exhortation to witness the destruction
of a fallen humanity. Klimovs film tells the story of Florya, an innocent who finds a gun and joins
the partisans resisting the Nazi invasion of Belarus during the Second World War. Floryas journey
involves his first sexual awakenings with a camp prostitute and the humiliation by authority when

154
he is left behind by the partisan army, his boots commandeered for an older man. Later he
discovers himself to be orphaned, his family, along with his whole village murdered. Thereafter,
he drifts, a mute witness to genocide. He is present at the massacre of a village, its population
rounded up and locked in a church which is then burnt to the ground. Florya survives, even after
having a gun put to his head. After this extended scene, Klimov throws the spectator, with the
most violent of elliptical cuts, to the aftermath of the Nazi armys own annihilation in a partisan
ambush. As the few surviving soldiers cower and plead for their lives, Florya, barely able to speak,
is thrust forward as the agent of witnessing and of judgement upon whose gesture the Nazis are to
be condemned. But the redeeming intervention of wisdom is denied as the blurry distinction
between revenge and justice succumbs to a chaotic, confused violence. Prematurely grey-haired,
Florya turns to see himself replicated in a near-identical child same clothes, same suitcase,
trotting off on the heels of the partisan army. Left amid the detritus of battle Florya finally gets to
fire his gun: at a portrait of Hitler lying trampled in the mud. This rupturing instant ignites a rapid
rewind through archive film, driven by raucous martial music and the sound of Hitlers speeches,
back through the Fhrers rise to power in Germany, back to the image of Hitler as a child. Here
the traumatised Florya pauses on the trigger. This final sequence, a jarring interruption to the
movement of the film, stepping as it does outside of the films own diegesis, restates the films
scriptural aspect with its emphasis of blame directed at the human, at the identification of the
human called Hitler (the films proposed title, according to Klimov, was originally Kill Hitler,
Klimov (1999), but also in the image of birth: an emphasis placed on original sin and the human as
Fallen.
Initially, Come and See reiterates the burden and suffering of a long journey in which Florya
is at the mercy of the events, the fates, that befall him. However, the close of the film and the
furious rewinding to the image of the child-Hitler speaks of despairing appeal to the origins of sin,
there in the face of the child in a photograph. This is the question of the origin of sin that intersects
with the mythological and cosmological formula of defilement to introduce the beginnings of
human culpability. In Kearneys terms, this is the scriptural (Kearney 2003: 84). Suffering
remains the dominant force and is configured as a lament which the film aesthetically replicates in
its unflinching account of madness and horror rendered as the continual framing of fully frontal
faces, iconic images of the pain of suffering staring directly back at the films viewer.

155
Nature and the landscape of war are inscribed into this narrative structure as a material
part of the wider coming-of-age trope that is linked to the child a common thread in Soviet
depictions of World War II, most notably realised in Ivans Childhood (1962). With its dense,
shadowy forests, gloomy swamps, evening glow and final, frozen woodland, Come and See places
the landscape of war within the tropes of allegory, fable, even fairy-tale, a note that further
emphasises the coming-of age theme of the film and the scriptural aspect of a lesson.
Accordingly, the destiny of the body remains caught within the allegorical configuration of fate: at
the close, Florya, still a child in stature, has taken on the countenance of an old man with grey hair
and a damaged face. Florya turns, and there behind him, about to run after the marching partisan
column, is a new child recruit, and exact replica of himself.
The Thin Red Line, as already noted, moves the developmental structure one stage further
on to the metaphysical. In Ricoeurs configuration it remains locked to the formula of sin.
However, it more clearly addresses the relation of sin to blame and human culpability. The film is
set during the US-Japan conflict in Guadalcanal during World War II. The opening scene presents
a series of images of natural history in the Pacific Islands. This is revealed as a microcosmic idyll of
two American soldiers who have gone absent without leave. Their recapture by the US Navy
introduces the arrival of the massed American military forces about to mount an amphibious
invasion of the islands. Thereafter, the journey made by C for Charlie Company across the island
from one battle to the next is punctuated by the persistent and inscrutable presence of the island
itself its flora, fauna and indigenous inhabitants. Multiple voiceovers from the different members
of C for Charlie Company drift in and out, intermittently reflected in the subjective imagery,
disconnected from the immediate event of the conflict and the action at hand. Overall, the film
configures a conflict that, while acute in military detail, with the US and Japanese armies
manoeuvring and fighting, is ultimately a meditation on the human and the natural world, of the
resistance of nature to human intervention and destruction. Behind the sound and fury of the
battle, the human trauma, violence, heroism, cowardice and sacrifice, is the impenetrable, silent,
obstinacy of nature, its unspeakable, indifferent existence. When the Americans finally leave the
islands, the last remaining image on the screen is that of as coconut shell lying at the waterline of
the beach, sprouting new life.
In The Thin Red Line, the cameras clinical, near forensic examination of beauty and horror
unfolds together with the thrust of narrative upheavals, constantly overlapping and undermining

156
the recognition of sense impressions in a pattern of suggestion. A pain-cum-pleasure ripples
through the chorus of soldiers as they submerge their identities into the mass. Malick confronts his
audience with the faceless military machine and its reliance on the depersonalisation of identity.
The central exception is Private Witt, one of the two soldiers AWOL in the opening scene who,
throughout the film, re-emerges as a figure resistant to command, shifting units according to his
like or dislike of its commanding officers. Nevertheless, Malick returns to a Christological motif at
the close in which it is Witt who sacrifices himself when he and a small group of comrades are
ambushed by the enemy. In his final moments, he stares death calmly in the face and accepts his
fate as the sacrifice for the safety of his comrades. In a metaphorical reference to the Christian split
between body and soul, Witts body is buried on the island. Standing over his grave, his company
sergeant, Welsh, asks, Where is your spark now? As the victorious Americans leave the island, it
is Witts voiceover that is heard from beyond the grave, Oh let my soul be in you now. Look out
through my eyes, look out at the things you made, all things shining.
Malick maintains conflict as a condition of things. The landscape of war is the totality of
life, of nature itself. The opening images of an island paradise retain the presence of crocodiles
slipping into water, vines entangled around trees. The films opening words are Whats this war
in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself, the land contend with the sea? and the
question is raised, Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two. The beatific
and the innocent in the persistent glittering sunlight, the iridescence and verdant foliage, the
colours of flora and fauna, have their own dark side before the blood and dirt and filth of the
human remains and the bomb-shattered battlefields intrude. Evil and violence is already in the
world as the condition of things and then there is the condition of willed action, coming and
going. It is this latter, the overlaying of human action and specifically human destruction onto
the condition of nature that relates the structure back to what Kearney describes as the
metaphysical conditions of human culpability and blame initiated by Augustine and that places
the speculative nature of evil in the will of humans to do wrong (Kearney 2003: 85). Humanity
redeems itself through its actions, like Witt, turning itself over, or back, to God.
The final category of guilt, or as Kearney rephrases it after Kant the anthropological
(Kearney 2003: 87) is epitomised in Brain De Palmas recent Redacted, set in Iraq and following
a unit of US soldiers stationed in Baghdad. The anthropological recognises an aporetics of evil
but seeks to distance it from any cosmological, theological or metaphysical origins, turning it over

157
to contingency rather than necessity and therefore, into the hands of human nature. For Ricoeur,
guilt is principally coupled with confession: the recognition of sin. De Palmas film is a response
to a documented atrocity and investigated war crime committed by US soldiers in Iraq.
In the film, the American unit guards a roadblock, patrols the city streets and kills time at
their base. The narrative method used to piece together their story places images and image-
making at the fore, threading together the full range of image-gathering technologies that define
the present conflict in Iraq: the soldiers own home videos and internet communications; a French
television news operation; camp CCTV cameras; insurgent web-broadcasts and internet posts and
an omnipotent classical realist film-making. The motive for such a collage of image-making is
forcefully presented in the opening scenes with the proclamation that the first casualty of war is
the truth. Once again, this statement alludes to questions of contingency and guilt rather than
necessity or fate.
In the course of the film, Iraqi civilians are murdered by mistake and a paternal sergeant is
killed by a booby-trap bomb. All of which leads to the revenge attack by members of the unit on
nearby civilians in which most of a family is murdered; the daughter also raped. A junior officer,
unable to control the few renegade soldiers in his unit and present but unable to prevent the
revenge killing is bullied into silence. Finally attempting to report the incident, he is put on trial
by a belligerent military in denial. The film ends with a coda consisting of still photographs war
reportage of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians, some clearly having been the models for events
and images in the film. The film proclaims, against its own movement, that the still image the
frozen instant from the aftermath of atrocity or violence is the signature of truth. It is the
image that de-alienates the horror of conflict, a fragment of truth as testimony in and of itself
without recourse to the temporal exchange of before and after, which Redacted seeks, as the
reconstruction of contingency over necessity, to assert.
At present, the war in Iraq continues. Unlike Vietnam, there is no historical outcome to
reflect or re-imagine. Redacted is one of several recent war films, reflecting on-going conflicts, that
replicate the change from the old just war certainties to the uncertainties of the present and in so
doing, have recourse to incidents rather than narrative arcs and guilt in place of destiny. Battle for
Haditha (2007) equally selects an atrocity from Iraq as an incident for lament and outrage. Waltz
with Bashir (2008) recounts atrocities committed during Israels 1980 invasion of Lebanon through
a soldiers guilty memories.

158
Redacted, in particular, insists that modern war is essentially a war of images against
images and allocates truths to those participants who are silent whilst remaining unable to extend
the question of mute witness to its own practice, choosing its fragments as determined anchors
for articulating judgmental causes and effects. The film would seem to endorse Gances prophetic
statement: war is the hell of images.
The landscape of war that Redacted presents is less a place defined by the city and desert of
its geographic location and more a question of the various textures of image that inter-relate to
produce the environment of conflict: a space of video, CCTV, digital imagery,
telecommunications and the apparatus of cinema and photography. It recalls Virilios assertion of
the space of war as that of the hyper-real and the speed of techno-telecommunications. However,
cinemas debt to its own end, to its temporal structure, configures its images within a destinal
framework, the sacrifice or redemption of its images to the inflections of mythic, redemptive
relations. In this respect, Redacted attempts to re-inscribe the body as image and as death. The coda
of still photographs of the dead and dying insists on death as the equivalent of truth as if the
stillness of photography were somehow more truthful, more like the stillness of death, than the
moving image.
What these few films demonstrate is the linear structure of cinemas dependence on
certain mythic structures to condition the terms of violence and conflict where it is accepted that
that conflict cannot be accounted for in traditional, psychologically realist terms. Where conflict
touches on the sublime of experience, myth and symbol are evoked to contain it as form.
Flanders, by contrast, interrupts those myths and as such, points to a different
interpretation of conflict and the motif of destiny. The films dominant theme is defilement in
the sense of a stain on the landscape. The title itself is synonymous with the collective, historical
memory of the First World War that was fought upon and blighted the landscape that has now
returned to a passive, sparsely populated rural topography. The image of the stain or mark recurs
throughout the film: the first close-up of Demester is of his arm which he holds in pain, a large
bruise distinct on the surface of the skin. Thereafter, there are close-ups of the earth being cut and
turned by a plough and the trace of Barbes footsteps in the frosted landscape. The literal stain of
war, and of the First World War, is transposed in time and place to the desert, in its trenches, and
again the mirrored close-ups of tank tracks and horses hooves turning the sand.

159
Dumonts film both presents its symbols and withdraws the movement of their logic.
Where history has shifted register, to a pervasive non-history, and a non-destiny, it has become
instead, a circular memory trace. War and the images of war remain the same. Its iconography
from trenches to helicopters can be interwoven. The images, effects, violence or numbed
emotions of the soldier remain the same, as image. But without the specifics of history, the
retrospective conflict, only the images pass over dislocated from the structures of meaning even
where they are reconfigured as pagan myth (Apocalypse Now), protest and lament (Come and See),
the sublime and the Christological (The Thin Red Line) or as the truth of images themselves
(Redacted).
Flanders, as its title suggests, is a memory trace of war and its accompanying images. It
does not specify any particular war as a means to root its events, narrative or characterisation in
any real; it is rather, the real as sense of a world at war, a universal antagonism at the heart of
the world. War is not contextualised by an historical fact (such as Vietnam, WWII, WWI, even
specifically Iraq), there is no pretext for a just war, or for a world of goals, aims, definable
enemies.
The mystery of the violence and war in Flanders is reduced to a series of binary
antagonisms that are both relentless and, at the same time, fold back upon themselves. War is the
binary of stillness and fury not as two representations of an aesthetic sublime, as in The Thin Red
Line but as the landscape of Northern France and that of an anonymous desert battlefield; the
home front and the theatre of war; the anguish of the imagination for Barbe and the numbness of
the violent encounters for Demester. The anachronisms and inconsistencies in the images of
battle, the ambiguous instant of possible personal revenge between Demester and Blondel, are
suggestive of a war in the mind, a male fantasy reconfigured in the unreality of the images of war.
As an objective war it may never exist. The film refuses to consign its mystery to myth and its
antagonism to cause and effect or the logic of articulation. It suspends its antagonism in the
numbness of the masculine and the mystery of the feminine as the intersection of two extremes,
echoed in the contradictions between landscapes and the experiences of violent rupture and
becalmed emptiness. By the close, Barbe and Demester are together again; their actions
replicating those at the beginning a silent, stubborn, emotionless sex. In this emptiness is the
hypostasis of the everyday that underlies the mystery of violence; an everydayness that suspends
the destiny or sacrifice implicit in the heroism of war.

160
Finally, Flanders reduces its expression of war to a non-representational real of shared
experience, that between Demester and Barbe. Theirs is the shared being of death and life
shared with Blondel too that is shared bodily contact. Guilt confers itself at the close as
Demester finally breaks down and admits to Barbe that he left the wounded Blondel to the enemy.
However, Barbe has already proclaimed this, whether through intuition or mystery. Demester
may only be confessing to what she demands. They lie prone together, framed in the interior
darkness of a barn; in nothingness. The entire film has suspended them both in a sensory real that
is, at the same time, insubstantial. It is a sense suspended between memory, dream and hysteria.
It leaves them together, having withdrawn any destiny or glorification, of the body or of meaning.
The shared finitude of death and life is the real of the world with all its scars.
In the end, what remains is the image of the everyday poised under the shadow of the
threat that is the word the name Flanders. It is the word, the symbolisation of meaning, that
forms the threat and the dread that hangs over the everyday senses without revelation.

161
CHAPTER 7

Defilement: The Asthenic Syndrome; Palms; Russian Ark

The Introduction to this thesis outlined Kira Muratovas The Asthenic Syndrome and the dilemma
posed by the critic Boris Vladimirsky, commenting from within a collapsing Soviet Union: that the
film appears to not to believe in the possibility of salvation and yet, to feverishly seek it. The films
final image evokes the Christological symbol par excellence, the kenotic Nikolai, arms
outstretched, prostrate and sleeping as a train carries him into the darkness of a tunnel a tomb
or a cave with resurrection seemingly deferred. Such a movement into darkness is, at the same
time, a loss of vision in both senses: of the ability to see at all in the dark, and the loss of vision
as a teleology, the vision of the Soviet State, or, as implied by the chorus of old women lamenting
Tolstoy at the opening of the film, a loss of the vision of art as a means to enlightenment.
This chapter aims to show how the notion of vision, that of sight and looking the
primordial element of the cinema and its conceptual formula for a set of values, a future-
oriented, teleological vision, is interrupted and withdrawn. Vision is torn away from the
signifying criteria of language to leave only the look. The language of the Soviet Union, its culture,
politics and symbols, is exhausted, leaving only the visible and its obscuring remaining in vision. It
is the suspension and withdrawal of vision that ultimately defers any conclusive meaning in
Muratovas film as it does to, in differing stylistic terms, in Artur Aristakisyans Palms. Both films
were produced during the political, social and physical collapse of the former Soviet Union, a state
whose own vision was suddenly obscured and withdrawn. Sokurovs Russian Ark was made some
years later but nevertheless expresses a tension between vision as an idea of culture, of values and
of history, and the obscuring of that vision in the Russian nations reorientation towards a
dominant Europe. In short, this chapter aims to show how each of these films reorients the
cinematic look away from a representation of values, or vision as meaning or counter-meaning,
to one of the tension between presentation and withdrawal a sense, after Jean-Luc Nancy, of
the very condition of the obscuring of vision in experiential terms.
Questions of wretchedness, suffering, violence and the possibility of redemption, of
defilement, sin and salvation, impress themselves upon each of these films as a sense of turning

162
away, the loss of vision in the present of certain defining aspects of history, teleology and future.
They point to the transition, in Ricoeurs development, from defilement toward sin: The
Asthenic Syndrome and Palms both express the visual stain of violence, suffering, abandonment and
wretchedness through the present conditions of social collapse within the Soviet Union. Russian
Ark evokes the spectre of the wasted revolutionary century that hangs imminently over the
Hermitage museum and the legacy of the cultural artefacts it contains. At the same time, each film
poses the question of a turning away from the transcendent, whether God, art, culture or the
spirit. This turning away presents itself as the loss of vision, both literally and metaphorically.
Western culture is one of light and vision. Both act as a well-established allegory or
metaphor dating back, at least, to Platos cave. Darkness, therefore, has been established as its
opposite, an absence, ignorance, death or nothingness. In the fragment that begins The Asthenic
Syndrome, the black and white section that follows the nurse, Natasha, in the immediate wake of
the funeral of her husband, her opening lines are Go to hell, all of you an aggressive, anguished
outburst not to the dead but to the living, the mourners at her husbands funeral who seem not to
feel the loss in the way that she does.
Framed in such away from an intimation of hell to the plunge into darkness The
Asthenic Syndrome offers very little on which to hang the possibility of salvation. Though, as a film
from Russia, it is perhaps not altogether appropriate to consign its imagery, its light and dark,
entirely to a Western metaphysics, since Russia lies on the cusp between a West and an East, not
fully consigned to a place in a Western (European) geography a point of discomfort raised
specifically in Alexander Sokurovs Russian Ark. There is, to stretch the point somewhat, a formula
more prominent in the Eastern church, of anastasis. It describes the descent into hell of the risen
Christ, a journey made in order to rescue the fallen Adam, the symbol of humanity, from his grave
(in Court 2007, 11). Perhaps then, the kenotic Nikolai is not so much the Christ crucified,
heading for the tomb, as the Christ that first awakes at the beginning of the second section of the
film, in the tomb of the cinema from which he embarks on his narcoleptic journey through the
rest of the film, its chaos, violence and hell, in a bid to wake humanity. Such a reading would
seem to invest too much in the scant symbolism of images as do light and dark as knowledge and
ignorance, something and nothing. Hegel pointed to the more crucial ambiguity of this
relationship:

163
Something can be distinguished only in determinate light or darkness (light is determined
by darkness and so is darkened light, and darkness is determined by light, is illuminated
darkness), and for this reason, that it is only darkened light and illuminated darkness
which have within themselves the moment of difference and are, therefore, determinate
being (in Stoichita 1997: 8).

The plunge into darkness at the end of The Asthenic Syndrome is not, in this sense, a plunge into
nothingness, or even hell, but a suspension of the look, of the ability to see, a movement into
obscurity.
However, it is possible that this plunge into darkness or obscurity is a vision, or dream,
of Nikolais. Prior to this sequence on the train, Nikolai has been shown consigned to a mental
ward in a hospital, the culmination of a sequence that cuts together school children in a classroom
with caged dogs in a pound. Jane Taubman has referred this sequence to its original intentions in a
shooting script for which Nikolais incarceration is directly linked to an acknowledged dream
sequence of escape, out into a blinding snowstorm (Taubman 2005: 57). In the film as it was
finally released, such a dream is more ambiguous. A nurse comes to close the windows in
Nikolais room, seemingly, in Taubmans reading, a pointer to sleep and, therefore, to dreams.
This is immediately followed by the visit to Nikolai of his student lover, Masha, and her friend,
intent on helping him escape. Once outside, in the grounds of the hospital, they pass a statue of
Ivan Pavlov, renowned scientist of reflex action and aggressive instincts, before a sudden cut to
the final scene aboard a train. A nameless female traveller, well turned out, looks directly at the
camera and screams abusive foul language (the scene for which the film conflicted with the State
censors). Beside her, another nameless traveller sleeps through her tirade as if Nikolais condition
of exhaustion is pandemic. Elsewhere on the train, Nikolai and Masha are in deep embrace, until
Nikolai falls backwards to the floor, fast asleep. Unable to wake him, Masha flees the train that
carries Nikolai into the dark tunnel.
This final sequence epitomises the films overall technique. There is no adequate means to
define the motivation of shots, their points-of-view, their status as objective or subjective. The
images in the classroom, organised and filmed as fiction, are cut against images taken of a city dog
pound, that is, documentary images in the most basic sense. All of the The Asthenic Syndrome is a
constant accumulation of such images, whose motivation and articulation is ambiguous, not

164
necessarily linked by narrative or cause and effect, merely by circumstance as moments in a
collapsing Soviet milieu. Articulation is relegated to a secondary status behind the more primary
function of looking, observing, accounting for, and declaring evident. The film, both films the
black and white film of Natasha and the colour film of Nikolai are an assembly of looks
directed at a disintegrating Moscow, and from time to time, the disintegrating Moscow looks
directly back, and shouts and screams. The climax presents a double exhaustion: the physical
exhaustion of Nikolai, and the exhaustion of the look, toward darkness and obscurity as respite
from the violence and debasement of the light. The look has no values attributed to it, in terms
of meaning derived from action and reaction or the logic of interpretation, only a look that
carries itself into obscurity rather than the light of some reconciliation or future perfection.
The Asthenic Syndrome is a film about ends made from the midst of a collapse that had not
itself entirely ended. The opening section, the Natasha film, does not equate to a narrative in its
own right. Only when this black and white section ends is it revealed as a film being projected in a
cinema and as such, having not witnessed its opening titles, we might assume it is the latter part of
a film already in progress. In itself, it recounts a series of instances related to a nurse, Natasha, in
the immediate aftermath of her husbands funeral. We have seen her abuse her fellow mourners.
Thereafter, she walks home alone, screaming curses and insults at passers-by in the street. At
home, she smashes a wine glass. She visits the hospital where she works and abuses the staff.
Returning home she picks up a drunk from the street, takes him home, undresses him in full view
of her neighbours and takes him to bed, only to break into hysterical tears and throw him out.
Later, back on the street, a young woman tells her she has a mark on her coat. Natasha and the
woman try to clean the coat. Seemingly becalmed, Natasha for once does not insult her but stares
directly into the camera: a face of lamentation. A shot of a projector beam reveals this sequence as
a film. The lights in the auditorium go up. Throughout, this sequence, Natashas brief, fragmented
moments of anguish are punctuated by the images of death: the cemetery, her husbands burial,
the photographs of the dead set into Russian graves, the photographs of people in a photographers
window the bureaucratic identification of a political system in its death throes.
This sequence, like the colour sequence of Nikolai that follows, has no dramaturgical
structure, no character arcs or emplotted events. Both are configured from an exposure to
fragments, moments, instances, simply an accumulation of sense impressions linked by
association. In that respect they have no tension in the dramatic formula, only suspense and the

165
question mark of ends how long could such an accumulation go on for; what could possibly
end it? Natashas sequence is ended by the rupturing revelation that it is a film within a film.
When the lights go up, a disgruntled audience shuffles away grumbling about its gloomy content
and ignoring the attempts of a master of ceremonies to engage them in a discussion of the film in
the old Soviet style; a moment played for irony, as the master proclaims the powerlessness of the
most masterful art before the enigma of artless reality (Taubman 2005: 51). But the obligations
to State control no longer hold up. A sleeping Nikolai and a detachment of Red Guards awaiting
the order to leave are all that remain, until they too file out, waking Nikolai.
Thereafter, the film follows him through a sequential assembly of moments: at the school
where he works, a teacher unable to maintain effective control of his class; seeking refuge in a
lecture theatre full of redundant busts of Lenin; at home with his wife and mother-in-law. At
school he delivers speeches in both Russian and English a fleeting anticipation of the new world
order to which Russia may be forced to submit. The sequences of Nikolai are countered by others
that depict characters unrelated either to him or to the events so far witnessed. Rather they form
fragments of the accumulation of instances from the public and the private. Jane Taubman has
noted, with a degree of reservation, the tension within these images redolent with religious
symbolism despite Muratovas own admission to being an unbeliever (Taubman 2005: 54).
Nevertheless, such framing retains this fundamental tension, as Taubman identifies: In a sense,
Muratovas film, composed of loosely connected scenes, is itself like an iconostasis, the wall of
icons mounted at the front of the church sanctuary. But as Taubman concludes, these images
constantly thwart the sacred with the profane: her images are negative, anti-iconic, rather than
positive. And, giving the example of Nikolai at home: The trinity surrounding the table breaks
into an ugly family quarrel (Taubman 2005: 55).
Two further sequences reiterate this iconostasis on the borders of the sacred and profane.
Nikolai again falls asleep in the midst of a teachers meeting and a young peoples bohemian party.
In the latter, naked figures both women and men, pose in static tableaux or gaze directly into the
camera, reiterating both the iconic and the confrontational, accusing formula of direct address the
film adopts throughout. As, once again, Nikolai falls asleep, it is unclear if these images are
objective events taking place within the context of the party or subjective images of Nikolais
dreaming state.

166
In this second half of the film, Nikolai is cast in terms reminiscent of the visionary of
apocalyptic literature, the mystical seer not uncommon to Russian tradition (caricatured with
Tchernoff), yet the motivational or prophetic formula for such visions is persistently clouded in
the obscurity of non-articulation. All that remains is the look, the exposure by the camera, the
films persistent looking. As if to add a further layer to the overall irony in this scene, Muratova
here uses Schuberts Unfinished symphony. The teachers meeting, during which Nikolai again
succumbs to sleep, snoring loudly, takes place in the midst of a chaotic, out-of-control, school.
Children pull faces at the windows of the meeting room. This is cut with the images of the dog
pound where a secretary has come in search of the missing school mascot. Amidst the caged and
condemned dogs Muratova poses her most provocative slogan directly to the audience that re-
emphasises the raw essence of looking: People dont like to look at this Thereafter, Nikolai is
found to be in the hospital mental ward from where he will arrive, prostrate on a train, heading
for the obscurity of the darkened tunnel.
Ultimately, however, as the train and Nikolai descend into the tunnel, the camera
remains, its watchful presence allowing the train to recede from view. Furthermore, the state of
sleep is a suspension of ends, as befits a film that is in immediate dialogue with, and an exposure
of, a condition not yet ended. It is not a death, in the modernist manner of Godard or Wenders.
The darkness is, in this sense, the necessary obscurity of the look where such obscurity is a crucial
presupposition of the nature of looking of being out of which sight may emerge. In this respect
it is the only possible end for The Asthenic Syndrome, whose looking at the perversity and
contradiction of human experience cut off from the traditional, historical, rhetorical formula for
redemptive reconciliation could go on looking indefinitely. Only a change in Russia itself could
redirect, or negate the necessity of the look. Since the film must end before Russia ends, it can
only emphasise the obscurity, exhaust the look, as a limit but not an end. And it also recognises
darkness and obscurity but not that of death and the need to look harder, to strain the look, as
a means to see at all.
Under the circumstances of the collapse of the Soviet State, seeing into darkness may be
an understandable trope. It recurs in Artur Aristakisyans remarkable film Palms. Though released
in 1993, its images an accumulation of silent, black and white documentary sequences of beggars
and slum-dwellers on the streets of Kishinev, Moldavia was recorded in 1990, an
acknowledgement made in an opening caption. The film is narrated by the film-maker, in an

167
apocalyptic, symbolist, quasi-religious visionary address, that is also, principally, a statement
directed to his unborn son. Its opening lines conclude with, My little son, Im closing my eyes to
see you.
The film is a counterpoint of visions: the vision of the mystical kind, the rhetoric of the
narrator brimming with the obscurely poetic part parable, part political manifesto is a
response to the starker vision of mere looking. The narration is a reaction to the raw data of
what has been silently filmed in situ the life lived on the streets of Kishinev, witnessed by the
camera. Moreover, the people that the camera seeks out and looks upon are those that the broader
society would regard as the invisible people precisely those that live on the margins of society,
unemployed, without or with only the bare minimum of housing or possessions. At the same
time, the camera is indefatigable and relentless in its looking: the wider community of Kishinev,
the workers, shoppers, those conforming or adapted to what the narrative calls the System, are
only ever glimpsed in the most fleeting fashion as background figures or shadows, as passing legs
and feet and the logos of sports shoes or shopping bags. So many of the camera angles, its positions
and points of view are stooped, low, or aimed at the ground without horizon since so many of
those that the camera records are bent over, hobbling, face-to-the-ground, or legless on make-
shift trolleys, or seated in doorways or shacks.
Although the city of Kishinev is named, it is not represented or defined in any spatial or
topographical sense. There are no establishing shots to locate the beggars, no placing of the
beggars and disenfranchised within a broader context of areas or ghettos set apart from the rest of
the city. The beggars are simply amongst the people, within the city. Their status is not defined in
relation to the city their numbers, circumstances or their relationship to the city and its
treatment of them. They are figures, bodies many broken, maimed, disfigured at once
parasitic and resistant. Equally there is no trajectory, no journey undertaken by these figures; no
consequences to be confronted or achieved by them or by the city either on their behalf or against
them. The images of the beggars are no different at the end of the film than they are at the
beginning. That is, their context, framing or articulation reveals no change, no secret, no
reflection; neither do they alter their relation to the narration. They merely accumulate numerical
evidence, or variations on a theme of obstinate being there. The fact that the images are all
recorded mute accentuates a certain timelessness and mystery. Often, those filmed speak
soundless words to the camera; at other times, aware of the camera, they simply stare back. This

168
mute status is disconcerting in a film shot in 1990; it seems to echo a different era, since
synchronised sound is so taken for granted, an audio realism implicit in any visual realism. It
evokes a time that is out of joint, so-to-speak, images of ghosts and spectres, those figures so
memorably evoked by another Russian, Maxim Gorky, who reside in the kingdom of shadows
(in Taylor & Christie 1988: 25).
The simple vision of the seen in Palms is then overlaid with the visionary rhetoric of the
address to the film-makers unborn son. The text is dense and constant for all of the films one
hundred and forty minutes. It is divided into two parts and ten chapters that are each not so much
episodic or narrative as addressing the central themes and particular images from a different
direction. Most of Part One operates around a description of a particular figure: fanciful, poetic,
and laced with violence. They are parable-like synopses of suffering or resilience, of catastrophe or
else a passive, immovable patience. There is a woman who, we are told, has been lying on the
ground for forty years; an old man who collects discarded clothes and hoards them the clothes of
the dead. There is Pithecanthropus, a prehistoric man in a hospital ward who is said to have
gnawed through his own veins; and the families that live in the swamp a shanty-town of
hovels in the midst of flooded ground. There is George the Victor, a beggar with no hands who
has mastered the art of lighting and smoking a cigarette using only the stumps of his arms; and
King Oswald, the legless man who scoots between the citizens of the System on his trolley.
There is Yazundokta, an old woman dragging a box: in it, the narrator tells us, is the head of the
jailer who abused her in prison. Then there is the blind boy who thinks all people are blind since
that is what his blind parents told him, and since the parents are blind too, the boy can only wait
until they chance upon his existence. Part Two shifts register: the same figures recur and a few
more are introduced, but the narrator reverts to the challenge to the System outlined in Part One,
the challenge mounted by the existence of the beggars.
The System has no particular identity or values; it is referred to only as the System.
Whether it stands for the collapsing Soviet State, for the mercantile, globalised economy
threatening to replace the State; whether it is political, social, religious, or all of these things is of
little consequence to those looked at in the film who are deprived of any currency within such
specifics. The System seems greater, more encompassing than all these things it hints at some
formula for existence, for being, perhaps an inauthentic being: since the narrator tells his unborn
son, [i]t has established an order of things in which you or I do not exist [] There is only the

169
law which exists for us, the law of blood, the law of fine matter (Chapter III). Moreover, the
System is a kind of biopolitics: Our blood, yours and mine, is the sacred axis of the whole
system. The laws of dialectics deal with it. [] According to these laws the system is a great
biomass, and a human being is a number of its chances (Chapter III). At the same time, the
System may be that which has replaced history, an end of history: Whats left is to learn the
language of birds, and become a social outcast, because the writers have used up all the words
(Chapter IV); or, Time has come into its final shape. [] Its no longer possible to dissent, there
is no point, because the system will absorb everything that has a meaning (Chapter V). The image
of the beggar, the narrator tells us, is the disturbance and excess that escapes the System:
Remember, the image of the pauper is always ahead of the system (Chapter VIII). Distress and
suffering is always in excess of meaning.
It is this last perspective that is referred back to an overall Christological emphasis within
the symbolism the narrator uses. The film opens with a reference to the outlawing of Christians by
the Emperor Nero, a moment imagined through the flickering of archive silent film: Biblical
extravaganzas from the primordial days of cinema all frenzied theatrical gestures as the
Christians are sacrificed to the lions. A film caption then informs us we are, thereafter, in
Kishinev, Year 1990 after the birth of Christ. The Systems weakness is its excess, its
supplement or remains. This is the weight given to the beggars, the paupers, as a messianic
persistence in suffering; a passivity and silent testimony to rejection and indifference; above all, a
spirituality through an invisible presence of those at the margins. However, here there is no
messianic figure to come. Salvation is attributed to madness and to spirit: The first way to reach
salvation is to go mad (Chapter I); and now its becoming clear that to become a dissident, one
has to go mad first (Part Two); Either a person lives in the spirit and leaves the system [] or
identifies oneself with the system and becomes its follower, its slave, forever. Salvation and
resistance are one and the same, personified in those that have no place in the System and are
remnants from it: Those who didnt have a place on Earth would come here to live describes the
derelict remains of an asylum (Chapter I).
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has gone to considerable lengths to develop a
political significance for the remnant derived from an original Judaeo-Christian root. According
to Agamben, the concept of the remnant is not measured by majorities or minorities, by
oppositions between those that belong to a particular mechanism and those that oppose it, but the

170
people as a concept is defined precisely by those that cannot be reduced to a majority or a
minority, a norm or an exception, but simply as a substantiality assumed by a people in a decisive
moment (Agamben 2005: 57), a point he claims is pronounced by Foucault when he identifies a
people as part of those who have no part the bearer of a wrong which establishes democracy
as a community of dispute (in Agamben 2005: 58). And as Agamben has asserted elsewhere,
that substantiality assumes itself first and foremost as a witness; a having witnessed through
experience (Agamben 1999: 162). In the first place there is, necessarily, recognition through an
exposure, a look.
In a further rhetorical hint at the scriptural or spiritual, each chapter unfolds as something
closer to a parable than a fable or an allegory, that is, as intimations of spiritual lessons rather than
moral discourse. Moreover, each parabolic chapter forms one part of the accumulated parable of
the overall film. The parable is distinct from the fable in the sense of its refusal to state an overall
lesson. Each chapter in Palms is closer to a fragment complete and incomplete. The images
remain in stark contrast to the descriptive terms employed by the narrator. In a recent essay, Jean-
Luc Nancy has singled out the role of the parable, distinct from the allegory, in terms that
reiterate the relationship that Palms promotes between what is said and what is seen, the double-
meaning of vision, as first and foremost, sense.
Crucially, in Nancys interpretation of the parable, it is distinct from an allegory in one
key aspect: It does not proceed out of a pedagogy of figuration (of allegory or illustration) but, to
the contrary, out of a refusal or a denial of pedagogy (Nancy 2008c: 5). This is because, when
Jesus is asked by his disciples to explain his use of parables he tells them they are meant for those
who seeing, see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand (in Nancy 2008c: 5).
This same phrase, says Nancy is used elsewhere in both the Old and New Testaments in reference
to the cult of idols, which should not be seen as a condemnation of the production of images of
the divine but a condemnation of those who do not first welcome sight into themselves prior to
all that is visible (Nancy 2008c: 6); in short, one must always already be prepared to receive, to
have the receptive disposition as Nancy calls it: This is not a religious mystery; it is the
condition of receptivity itself, of sensibility and of sense in general (Nancy 2008c: 6). Nancy
resists identifying the parable with a lesson that can be taught and learnt. Rather, it draws out of
the receptive disposition a notion that the parable describes something that cannot be learnt
since one must already be receptive the message. It is in this sense that Nancy is able elsewhere (in

171
The Ground of the Image) to exract the religious from the scred to identify it with the image in art
(Nancy 2005: 1): to crudely paraphrase, you either get it or you dont. Such is the parabolic language
of the narrators address: My little son, I am closing my eyes to see you. The descriptions of the
beggars and paupers on the streets of Kishinev, contained in the mute data of images, are not
allegories for another way of thinking or fables with a lesson in themselves. Rather the invitation is
to look and see and test receptivity against pathos, horror, indignation, resentment, against the
System.
Nancy continues: this particular receptivity should not be equated with the narrow,
proprietary religious formula that reserves such sight for a chosen minority. It is not, in more
moderate religious terms, a call to further research into its meaning either. It is, says Nancy,
immediately correlative when facing the image there is either a vision or a blindness (Nancy
2008c: 7). Here we find Nancy reiterating his wider configuration of sense as the simultaneous
excess and suspense of representation. The parable is not related to a figure a representative
meaning, nor an appearance, a mimetic relation to reality. Between the image and sight, then,
there is not imitation but participation and penetration (Nancy 2008c: 7). We can recall this same
expression, with respect to regard in Nancys text on the cinema of Kiarostami: Here the look
enters space; it is a penetration before it is a consideration or a contemplation (Nancy 2001: 14).
Through this excess of the visible and the invisible, the visible without clearly defined meaning,
Nancy makes the initial, tentative but suggestive, connection between the parable and perhaps
all modern art: There is no message without there first being or, more subtly, without there
also being in the message itself an address to a capacity or an aptitude for listening (Nancy
2008, 8) or looking. By extension then, the image and especially the image in Palms does not
represent a regulatory principle or a value or a relation between images: they exist, as Nancy says
of the parable, as an excess that evokes only its provenance or [] its address (Nancy 2008c: 9).
Each image, each sequence of evidence, is present and of itself, one after another. Together they
are seeking the one who has the ability, the receptive disposition to recognise them. The
narrator then aims his address at his unborn son: the images await the one who can see them for
what they are. It is not a waiting for some figure or concept that will redeem, correct or reconcile
these images. It is only a wait for the proper witness, which is, in itself, a restating of the singular
configuration of the look not as recognition of a representation but as a challenge to the
obscurity that always remains in presentation. The narrator tells his unborn son, And while you

172
are on this earth, just watch. [] The time will come when people will extract new words from
your silence. The violence, suffering and degradation inherent in Palms do not constitute nihilism
or an apocalypse. The film is addressed to the future. However, like The Asthenic Syndrome, this
future is tentative and may well be more of the same. There is no figure or formula for restitution,
reconciliation or redemption, but there remains a demand. Where The Asthenic Syndrome evokes an
exhortation of sorts People dont like to look at this, but nevertheless I am making you look
Palms is more of a warning: do not be distracted by so many values and meanings of the System
its laws, dialectics, consumption simply make sure, first, that you are able to see what is
obscured in its midst.
Vision, sight and darkness occur again at the beginning of Alexander Sokurovs Russian
Ark. Over a black screen the narrator begins, I open my eyes and I see nothing. The film begins
with a violent occurrence, an accident the narrator tells us, that delivers him into the midst of
the nineteenth century throng pouring into the Hermitage museum. These same characters
reappear at the close attending a lavish ball in 1913, close to the First World War and the Russian
Revolution. Between this beginning and end Russian Ark tours the galleries and rooms of the great
pre-Revolutionary architectural and cultural edifice, peering at artworks and glimpsing
reconstructed fragments of history, all famously in a single continuous shot. Much debate on
the films release centred on its ambiguous evocation of the pre-Revolutionary era: was it a
celebration, lament or critique of all things pre-Revolutionary, pro-Romanov and anti-Bolshevik?
Ian Christie noted the inevitability of these reservations since the twentieth century casts all art,
especially Russian, as ideology. But, as Christie concludes, Sokurov is neither judging nor
attempting to persuade, likening Sokurovs self-imposed task to a certain, more humble, and
especially Russian perspective beloved of the Symbolists that sees art as a sacred gift handed
down through the generations. The emphasis is on keeping faith and doing ones duty rather than
striving for originality or fame (Christie 2003: 10) which may seem contradictory in respect of
a film of such technical bravura and brilliance. Wherein lies the films greatest conundrum: why
would a film that sets out to reflect one of the worlds greatest collections of cultural and artistic
artefacts demand such a unique and restrictive formal technique?
The sheer force of this ninety-six minute continuous take impressed itself into every
review of the film on its release. Many reviews succumb to this force, imagining the intricate
choreography going on behind the camera, the exacting standards of preparation the film must

173
necessarily have required, and, most commonly, the reflexive condition of the possibility of
failure, the contemplation of the consequences of mistakes by cast, crew or technical equipment.
This is given an added frisson by the knowledge, privileged to critics, that Sokurov was allowed
only one day in the famous museum to accomplish his project. Other reviews object that there is
nothing intrinsic to the films content that would be different if the film were shot and edited in
the usual manner, since, if one is intent on focusing on the relations between the paintings,
people and historical moments the film refers to, there is no analysis or overarching idea to
which these fragments conform; no obvious story to be told or interpretation to be deduced (in
Ebert 2003). Other critics, particularly those with a greater knowledge of Russian history, gloss
the technique to contemplate the films various fleeting references Catherine the Great, the
Romanovs, the poet Pushkin, a visit by an Arabic envoy, the briefest of glimpses of the Hermitage
in the twentieth century as coffins are constructed during the siege of Leningrad. Then there are
the contemporary points of reference: the blind nun and art critic who describes paintings, the
uninterested sailors wandering on shore leave, interrupting Mikhail Piotrovsky, the Hermitage
director. Most crucially, there is the figure of the Marquis de Custine, the nineteenth century
French diplomat who converses with the unseen narrator, voiced by Sokurov himself. This latter
dialogue predominates and formulates the locus of the films preoccupation with the status of
Russia in relation to Europe, geographically, culturally, artistically. However, as Julian Graffy
observed, [t]heir views of Russia and its place in Europe are never fully reconciled and both are
revealed to be partial (Graffy 2003: 53).
The Marquis is a deliberate signal for this tension or antagonism between Russia and
Europe a real-life historical character who wrote a travelogue, Russia in 1839, and kept
company in the artistic and literary salons of his day alongside Balzac, Stendhal and Hugo. In a
room full of neo-classical sculpture he baits the narrator: Why do you find it necessary to
embrace European culture? For what reason? Why borrow also Europes mistakes? In a lengthy
corridor full of reproductions of Vatican frescos he chides, Russians are so talented at copying!
Why? Because you dont have ideas of your own. Your authorities dont want you to have them.
Elsewhere, Custine teases the narrator over Pushkin Nothing special; Im sorry if Ive
offended your nationalist sympathy. Custine, a ghost-figure trapped in his own era, knows
nothing of the twentieth century. When he hears of a revolution he congratulates himself on

174
foreseeing disaster: I have never believed that a republic was suitable for a country as large as
Russia, to which the narrator jibes: You Europeans are democrats who mourn the monarchy.
This Russo-European legacy is played out further in respect of the museums art
collection, gathered by a Russian aristocracy that epitomised cultural patronage and political
terror. A court spy trails the narrator and Custine throughout. It is the legacy of art, collected
from across Europe Italian painting and sculpture, works by the Flemish Masters accumulated
by a monarchy intent on securing a parity with, even perhaps surpassing, the established houses of
Europe. The film retains an ambiguity toward this exercise: the accumulation of culture is both a
cause for celebrating a wider European creativity and a Russian appreciative sensibility and it is a
testament to power and imperial prestige.
However, the fusion of western European art and vignettes of a kaleidoscopic Russian
history prompts a relationship between culture and history that transcends the particular, seeming
to intuit an essential, or eternal, relationship between the two. Ian Christie quotes from an
interview with Sokurov on this point: Who would we be if not for museums? Museums are not
about preserving the past, theyre about preserving the future. If we dont begin to appreciate the
achievements of European civilisation today, tomorrow were going to lose it (in Christie 2003:
10). Coupled with the dark picture of the twentieth century glimpsed in the frame hall doubling as
a morgue and coffin shop, and the reference to the Soviet era as the wasted twentieth century, it
is understandable that some critics would detect a hint of mawkish nostalgia. From a cinematic
perspective one may be even inclined to detect in the directors resistance to the cut, to montage,
a resistance to the defining characteristic and innovation of the Soviet cinema to follow with the
revolution.
Tim Harte has argued that the film adopts a subtle montage of its own through its use of
architectural frames, of doorways that open and close to divide different sequences episodically
and spatially. He notes the use of sound, a certain swooshing noise that accompanies the camera
as it sweeps through these divides, calling attention to these moments of separation and
connection (Harte 2005). For Harte, this framing is crucial: it is the distinguishing characteristic of
the films ambitions toward a presentation of the eternal. In Hartes analysis, Sokurovs camera
continually seeks out the paintings, easing the film frame into and out of unity with the great
images of art, a constant elision between the transcendent quality of an historical artwork, a
singular instance of pictorial creation, and the ephemeral quality of the moving film image. By

175
extension, this dialogue between the eternal, preservative qualities of painting and the motion of
film speaks of the ongoing human struggle against mortality (Harte 2005: 44). Such a struggle is
accentuated as in Sokurovs own rhetoric with the essence of the museum as the vessel or
ark. Such a struggle with mortality is nowhere more apparent than in the glimpse Custine makes
of the frame room during World War II: where death and violence are in the ascendancy, the
frames are empty like so many lost lives (Harte 2005: 56). In the end, the combination of painting
and cinema, pictorial, architectural and cinematic frames, indicates the fluctuation between
mortality and eternity, as well as between the present and the past, [that] is ongoing within the
museum and palace (Harte 2005: 58).
If such rhetoric seems to overburden the status of both painting and the cinematic image
with an idealism it nevertheless points to the preoccupation with a rationalisation of the cinema as
first and foremost a temporal articulation and mediation. Julian Graffy approaches the continuous
shot from a similar conceptual position: If history and culture are flux and irresolution, then
perhaps we can best address them through a journey which alternates fluid motion with moments
of stasis and periods of dizzying convulsion (Graffy 2003: 53). Sokurov has talked metaphorically
of making his film in a single breath (Christie 2003: 11). He does not go so far as to suggest if
this is an inhalation, an exhalation or a held breath. Since the camera for the most part travels
forwards we might infer an exhaled breath as if the camera were itself born along on this breath, a
metaphor loaded with finitude, with exhaustion and the emptying of life, though such an
assumption would seem to conflict with the films final utterance: And we must drift forever, and
we must live forever.
Elsewhere, the director has referred to his preference for a favourite grammatical form:
the present continuous (in Christie 2003: 11). Leaving aside the symbolist and occasionally over-
precious rhetoric associated with Sokurovs film, it is here, in the films present continuous
(Pasolinis primordial state of cinema) that Russian Ark offers another inference: the cinema as
look, an ethos of looking. The present continuous is the state of looking. And, with the films
opening reference to sight, to vision, it is the relationship between sight and obscurity that
remains at its heart. As the narrator resigns us to drifting and living forever, the camera has
emerged from the Hermitage and plunged into the obscurity of the St. Petersberg fog. Once
again, looking into obscurity is the films condition, its awareness of its historical present, its only

176
means to suspend itself, and its retention of the demand to look, where obscurity is the necessary
blind spot within every act of looking.
At this point, we can begin to locate what Jean-Luc Nancy calls an ethos of the look:
One must reaffirm again the ethos of the look not by turning ones eyes toward a firmament
spangled with values, but by facing straight ahead into obscurity (in Gasch 1997: 151). In this
first example, Nancy was writing of politics and history. Later, commenting on the films of Abbas
Kiarostami, he writes, capturing images is clearly an ethos, a disposition, and a conduct in regard
to the world (Nancy 2001: 16). The question of an ethos of looking is one that Nancy uses with
respect to a mode of address for the cinema that withdraws from the currency of representation
and meaning and realigns itself with a presentation of sense. Nancy uses ethos, along with
exposure, respect, regard and justice at various times throughout his writings on politics
and aesthetics: such terms serving to emphasise the ethical but non-representational dimension.
As Laura McMahon has identified, terms such as vision, reality and representation
denote encoded ways of looking at things which do not do justice to worldly existence
(McMahon 2010: 76). The real, onto which the cinema looks, in Nancys configuration, does
not equate with a literal visualisation or re-presentation but is argued as a question of taking care
which, as noted in Chapter Four, extends from the Heideggarian conception of the artwork as
unconcealment. Recalling the Hedeggarian notion of care as both an anxiety and a respect
(Inwood 2000: 57), Nancys configuration of an ethos of the look withdraws the cinematic
image from an explicitly representational imperative that consigns each image to a set of
determined values that is a mastery of the world. Rather, it attempts to locate the image as the
limit situation of sense, or an exposure to worldly existence that is affective, expressive but
suspended or in excess of full completion within a representational order of meaning. It is an
ethos which includes the tension of presentation and withdrawal that can occur within an image
or an historical event.
It is in this respect that an ethos of looking can equally apply to The Asthenic Syndrome,
Palms or Russian Ark. It should not be equated with a style or a particular technique of framing,
camera movement, or any consistent formula. The tension, within each of these films, between
vision and seeing and the withdrawal or the obscuring of that vision is aimed at exposing not
simply a representational vision but an historical and ideative vision also: the very vision of a
Soviet history and State that is collapsing. Furthermore, it is in this latter respect that the aesthetic

177
suspension and obscuring of vision reflects the particular post-historical hiatus from which these
films emerged. Nancy suggests, writing of the end of Soviet Communism and the universal
expansion of Europe (the very same conundrum that Sokurov identifies in Russian Ark), the
pressing concern is less a matter of looking at the world in terms of the vision of what it should
be, dominated by a totalising horizon, but, rather, a matter of taking a finite look at the infinite
(in Gasch 1997: 151). As Rodolphe Gasch summarises: Once the universal is no longer
recognizable as that which is most proper to us, the incumbent task is not to seek to reanimate it
by calling upon values but rather to look, without looking away, at what thus happens to us
(Gasch 1997: 151, my emphasis).

178
CHAPTER 8

Sin: Stntang; Songs from the Second Floor

In his hermeneutic development of the symbols of sin and redemption, Paul Ricoeur extends the
phase of sin to a relationship between idolatry and the Wrath of God (Ricoeur 1967: 63). Ricoeur
argues that sin comes about when humanity has a conception of God but it has turned away from
Him. He locates the Judeo-Christian dichotomy of suffering and indignation as a new modality of
dread expressed through the symbols of Gods wrath (Ricoeur 1967: 63). Suffering is no longer
the effect of a resurgence of a cosmological or primordial chaos but is the wrath of God Himself, a
consequence of humanitys hubris and vanity (Ricoeur 1967: 75). In turning away from God,
humanity has likened itself to God and this is the source of false idols whose nothingness is the
correlative to this forgetting. Idolatry replaces the true recognition of God with a false
representation in the image of humankind (Ricoeur 1967: 76). This brings about the Wrath of
God, which Ricoeur notes, is no longer the spectacle of unsubstantial things here he cites
vapor, exhalation, mist, wind, dust; the obscuring of vision but the spectacle of false
sacredness (Ricoeur 1967: 75). The destruction and catastrophe that occurs as a result of the
Wrath of God is also no longer that of eternal punishments or the cosmological cycles of fate; it
remains within the limits of a penal interpretation of real history (Ricoeur 1967: 67).
This chapter is concerned with the evocation of such myths and symbols, bound to
idolatry and false promises, and their interruption. Two films stand out in this regard: Bla Tarrs
Stntang, and Roy Anderssons Songs from the Second Floor. Each of these films, marked by
destruction, disintegration and decay at a social, systemic level, is also replete with images of
idolatry in terms of both secular occultism and religious iconography. Likewise, each film is bound
by a particular sense of community: for Stntang it is the structure of a collective farm that is
about to be disbanded; in Songs from the Second Floor, it is the exchange dynamics of a modern
mercantile city that start to fall apart. Questions of community cut to the heart of the system of
myth and symbol as the formula for shared meaning. It is the interruption by destruction, decay
and disintegration that opens, at the limit, the recognition of such symbolic structures of
community. The argument of this chapter, then, is that Stntang and Songs from the Second Floor,
in presenting worlds that are ostensibly falling apart, seek to give a sense of those worlds and

179
their tenuous structures whilst withdrawing the salvific terms of overcoming or recovery at the
base of traditional myth. They seek to ask the question that Jean-Luc Nancy asks in The Creation of
the World, or Globalization,

The fact that the world is destroying itself is not a hypothesis: it is in a sense the fact from
which any thinking of the world follows, to the point, however, that we do not exactly
know what to destroy means, nor which world is destroying itself (Nancy 2007: 35).

In Bla Tarrs Stntang, a world has come to an end, or, at least, it is on the brink of ending.
Through its seven hours of screen time the film charts this world, and its community of people, as
it gradually disintegrates. The film is not about the end of the world, of the natural world or the
physical, material global world omnipotently viewed in its catastrophic destruction. It is not a
disaster movie as such.
Jean-Luc Nancy describes a world as a totality of meaning, to which a certain meaningful
content or a certain value system properly belongs in the order of knowledge or thought as well as
in that of affectivity and participation (Nancy 2007: 41). In this respect, there is not one world but
countless worlds, each a totality of meaning identified with the accord of its community:

Belonging to such a totality consists in sharing this content and this tonality in the sense of
being familiar with it, as one says; that is to say, of apprehending its codes and texts,
precisely when their reference points, signs, codes, and texts are neither explicit nor
exposed as such (Nancy 2007: 41).

The worlds that are disintegrating in Stntang are historical and conceptual as well as they are
material and ideal. In its opening shot, a gradual, unbroken track of more than nine minutes, a
herd of cows lumbers from a barn out into the rain-drenched yard of a collective farm. Events take
place in Hungary, we presume, though the location is never mentioned. However, since all the
characters speak Hungarian and the great plain and its sparse horizon surrounds the farm, it is
acceptable to assume what occurs does so in Hungary.
The films director has categorically denied any allegorical meaning for his film released
in 1994 and set on an already obsolete collective farm. These terms of production make allegorical

180
readings of the collapse of communism tempting but the film offers no explicit points of
reference. John Orr, reviewing the film, highlights the problem: For those who wish to read
politics into fable, a typical western response to things eastern, Tarr offers little consolation. Who
says this is a commentary on 1989? Might it not equally be a meditation on 1956? (Orr 2001:
24). Allegory, bound to the logic of representation, overshoots its mark. Tarrs film may be all or
none of these things that is a part of its mystery. But at its core is the erosion and disintegration
of the systems of trust, organisation and community that must be sustained in human relations,
and it is the vision, especially in its future sense of a faith in the abstracted promise of salvation,
a metaphysics of desire that the film formally and narratively exhausts and returns to the horizon
of the material, the real.
What can be said of Tarrs film, and its world, is that there is a community of people and a
collective farm located in a sparse expanse of windswept, rain-sodden Hungarian plain. This
collective farm, whose operation, we must assume, has held together the small community of
people, has ceased as an entity. Its members are awaiting the arrival of a substantial final payment.
We learn of this since one man is plotting with his wife to steal the money. However, his
unfaithful wifes lover overhears the scheming and secures himself a part in the theft. At the same
time, word gets around that a mysterious, charismatic figure called Irimas, who had once
promised to help the collective but had then disappeared, has been seen on the road, apparently
returning. The news of his return assumes additional portent since the community had been led to
believe that Irimas was dead. With their immediate futures blighted by uncertainty the members
of the collective rapidly project their hopes of escape, of protection, security and affluence onto
this figure and his past promises. Irimas, resurrected, appears as the means of securing a destiny
for the group seemingly abandoned by the movement of the inexplicable forces and circumstances
they believe to be beyond their control. Thereafter, the small community is left to wait and the
film waits with them.
However, what the film reveals to the audience the collective remain oblivious is that
Irimas is nothing but a petty criminal who has spent those absent years in gaol. Moreover, in a
typically ambiguous sequence, he is seen to take orders from a security officer, with whom he has
no choice but to collaborate, apparently with the instruction to inform on the collectives
members. Freedom and order are evoked but everything, according to the policeman, is a
necessity of law. To what end or purpose, or on what basis the law is interested in the

181
collective remains unspecified. The scene merely echoes the function of a police state or an
oppressive socio-political order. Released, and drinking in a bar, Irimas unleashes a verbal tirade,
threatening to blow them all up though whether they refers to the immediate drinkers whom
he regards with disdain, or the collective, the state police or, indeed, everyone, is again not
specified. Nevertheless, on the road with his accomplice Irimas unleashes a rhetoric of vengeance
towards the collective, accusing them of ressentiment: They were servants and that they will be all
their lives; slaves that lost their master; they go after that shadow like a herd, for they cant live
without splendour and illusion.
In the meantime, the interrelations of the collective are sketched out further, each
character seemingly standing for a certain type in a broader configuration of humanity the
woman who sleeps around, the men who sleep with her, the needy who require others to cling to
for self-justification, the loners, the selfish, the desperate. As types they spread across the most
helpless, the most miserable, the perverse and contradictory aspects of human relations and
human nature. There is the community doctor, an alcoholic who watches all the others from his
window, scribbling down their daily activities and infidelities in a notebook. Countless other
notebooks testify to his lengthy surveillance although he appears to do nothing with this
information. When he runs out of plum brandy the film embarks on a lengthy sequence following
his shambolic struggle across the yard in pelting rain to acquire more. There is also a neglected
child: she is seen to torment a farm cat, which she eventually poisons. Later she poisons herself,
unnoticed by the community who spend a day and night dancing and drinking and descending
remorselessly into stupor.
Irimass arrival coincides with the discovery of the child. He makes a speech over her
corpse condemning the collective for their implicit responsibility for her death through their
natural propensity to sin. He threatens them with the logic of a police investigation before
ultimately setting out his scheme and his need of their money in return for their collective
redemption. He plans to acquire an estate and establish an island where no one is powerless,
where everyone will live in peace and will feel safe. The collective place themselves, their faith
and their money, in Irimass hands.
The following morning the group pack, destroying what items of furniture cannot be
transported, and set off, preparing to liase at the manor designated by Irimas. In the meantime,

182
he and his henchman have gone to a town to meet a man from whom he wishes to buy explosives,
the purposes of which remain again unelaborated. He also sends his report to the police officer.
Assembled at the new location, a derelict country house, Irimas reports that the plan
must be postponed. The reasons given are ambiguous, implying either political or possibly
criminal undercurrents Their primary objection is the fact that the manor [] could hardly be
brought under control he states without identifying who they are. As such, the collective
designated as special people by Irimas are to be dispersed throughout the town where they are
instructed to wait in isolation until further notice. At the police station, two junior officers type
up Irimass report with little interest or urgency, occasionally moderating the wildly abusive
invective that Irimas has used to describe the group.
Finally, the film returns to the farm, where the doctor having spent some days in
hospital as a result of collapsing during his trek for alcohol continues to make observations from
his window, seemingly oblivious that all the other people have moved on. Tormented by the
sound of ghostly bells coming from a derelict church that lost its bell tower in the war, the
doctor investigates. He finds an improvised bell being tolled by a madman. Returning home the
doctor boards up his windows. In his notebook, he begins to scribble a commentary that was
heard at the opening of the film, delivered by an omniscient narrator, the content of which is
almost, but not quite, the same.
Such is the minimal plot of Stntang, a simple inventory of greed, infidelity, swindling
and an irrational faith in a false messiah. The coming of Irimas, the false prophet-cum-con man, is
not a plot to be revealed. Organised as a series of twelve chapters, the film informs its audience of
Irimass crookedness in chapter two. Appearance and deception are made explicit. Instead, the
effects of deception and, more particularly, the faith in redemptive illusion, is the films target. As
Andrs Blint Kovcs suggests, this metaphysical territory [the traditional locus for other-worldly
salvation] is none other than a shelter from utter despair, and belief in it is the final proof of
human defencelessness (Kovacs 2004: 241). As with The Asthenic Syndrome, Stntang is
determined to resist all narrative formula for redemption, either collective or individual. What it
shows is the misery and helplessness to which human existence can succumb, the evident failure of
salvific promises and the propensity of human beings to abuse, cheat and undermine each other.
Yet its central formal technique is not an articulation that consigns such misery to the definition of
the world. Instead, its perpetual suspense and withdrawal seeks, by looking directly at the fissures,

183
cracks, failings and inconsistencies of narrative and idealised solutions, to expose in something
like a cinematic deconstructive manoeuvre the limits of such solutions.
Structurally it replays some but not all of its parts from varying perspectives: an infidelity
revealed in chapter one is replayed as those aspects visible from the doctors window in chapter
three; the drunken wake is glimpsed by both the doctor on his trek and the doomed child
searching for her family. Such replaying and repetition does not provide revelation. It does not
piece together narrative information as if points of view were parts of a jigsaw or some cinematic
panopticon that might forensically lead towards a truth there to be detected. They are merely
occurrences or coincidences of time and place bound by intersecting lives in a finite space. There
are certainly allusive thematic recurrences dispersed throughout: the notion of a herd instinct
makes itself felt not simply in the collectives willingness to follow Irimas or in the films opening
shot of cows emerging from a barn and moving across the farmyard. It recurs in another scene in a
seemingly deserted town: Irimas witnesses a herd of horses galloping across the central square
(The horses got away from the slaughterhouse again). In between these minimal events and
encounters there is much waiting, walking and watching. In fact, it is waiting, walking and
watching that become the films key methodological motifs.
Waiting could be said to be the films dominant mode of address, a condition replete with
suspense: waiting for the money and waiting for the opportunity to get away with the money,
these are then interrupted by the wait for Irimas to return. The group move through phases of
expectation rumour, speculation, anticipation, and agitation. When the prophet arrives there is
the waiting for instructions, waiting to leave for the promised estate and ultimately, the final
dispersal throughout the town to wait on the promise of further instructions.
Walking is the second mode of suspense, and a suspension. Irimass movements are
metered by lengthy sequences in which he and his accomplices stride through featureless
landscapes, along pot-holed country roads and down litter-strewn streets in towns emptied of all
other human life. The doctor too, embarks on two lengthy walks to fetch alcohol and to
investigate the derelict church. On each occasion of walking the camera proceeds to track the
walk, either following, reversing or parallel, as a measure of the present. Whilst these walks
indeed connect the minimal plot and spatial relations of the films world, their sheer excess inverts
their narrative necessity to present the order of time as a perseverance of being. Each walk does
not convey a small fragment of a punctuating ellipsis between plot points that lead to revelation so

184
much as an extended fragment of the presence of the wait. These walks, located against
panoramic, featureless horizons or funnelled into distant architectural perspectives in the town,
serve to emphasise the physicality of the walk and of distance. Each walk takes place as an act of
perseverance in the face of the elements: pouring rain and debris-swirling winds. Tarr carries this
deliberate stressing of the present-continuous duration of the walk over into Werckmeister
Harmonies, reiterating its rhythmic marking of time, its extended imminence without arrival.
There, as in Stntang, the relationship between the walk and the camera that tracks it demands a
concentration of looking allied to a severe patience, a state of being in imminence.
Imminence is present in the watching that Tarr transfers from his earlier film, Damnation
(1988). Also fuelled by duplicity and double-crossing in a small Hungarian town, Damnation
constructs a milieu in which human beings spy on one another and when not spying on one
another, they watch time passing: expressed most explicitly in the films daring opening shot, a
lengthy, painfully slow track back from the image of a coal-ferrying cable car, back through a
window as an apparent point-of-view shot, only to pass over the watchers shoulder to reveal a
man gazing into space that, at the same time, subverts the tensions of cinematic subjectivity with a
rejection of the empathetic gaze by stressing the deliberate, passive-objective camera. Stntang
continues this method, while as an activity within the film, the doctor gazes ceaselessly from his
window; the child gazes out across the plain to the blank line of the horizon; Irimass lackey, the
girls teenage brother, gazes along a road, waiting for his master. When Irimas arrives, the boy
briefs him on all the relations and infidelities of the group: it is clear that he too must engage in his
fair share of spying. Throughout the film figures walk towards vanishing points or along horizon
lines; they emerge from or head towards the limits of perspective and of narrative space, to and
from and without ever reaching its vanishing points.
In the end, this waiting, walking and watching amounts to the most exhaustive terms for
the documentation of the disintegration of the historical and conceptual world of the collective
farm and its community of workers, and the material and ideal (or visionary) world of their
salvation, promised by Irimas a world of hope and trust. Both of these worlds are thereafter
seen to be fragile, formulated on the flimsiest of grounds and ultimately, under the stress and
friction of human abuses, disintegrate and decay. In this respect, Stntang is a film of process.
Since much is inferred but nothing ultimately resolved, the film gives evidence of the gradual
disintegration of the plans and projections offered at the beginning. Yet, with the reasons for so

185
many of these events shaded in mystery, even the likelihood that the special people will ever get
back together is not an impossibility despite the odds having been stacked resolutely against it.
The limit situation of worlds that the film configures and proceeds to disintegrate calls
attention to what Nancy has called, in relation to both the presentation of worlds and the
disposition of the cinema (as a type of artwork), an ethos, or sometimes a habitus. That is, each
world is a unifying, totalising idea or image of a world, a vision or concept determined by a shared
correspondence between those for whom it is recognised and experienced. In this way, Nancy is
able to point to an ethos or habitus for the developed terms of a cinema history marked by
representation: you already have a hundred years of cinema in your eyes, in your habitus or your
ethos. Film sits planted in your culture I mean in your ways of living []. You have already
composed and then broken down a wealth of film genres and cinematic myths (Nancy 2001: 14).
In Stntang the world of the collective farm, and the world of Irimass promise as
habitus (a configuration of shared community) and ethos (a configuration of shared interpretation
and understanding) is expressd by that which exceeds these terms: the decay, the disintegration,
the suspension of the world. This ungrounded excess presents instead, a world of sense, the
raw material for understanding; that which has escaped the logic of myth or has been transposed
into idolatry and false hopes that are seen to be failing. It is the failure that is addressed directly:

If the world, essentially, is not the representation of a universe (cosmos) nor that of a here
below (a humiliated world, if not condemned by Christianity), but the excess beyond
any representation of an ethos or of a habitus of a stance by which the world stands by
itself, configures itself, and exposes itself in itself, relates to itself without referring to any
given principle or to any determined end, then one must address the principle of such an
absence of principle directly (Nancy 2007: 47).

Stntang seeks to challenge the ethos of one community, or habitus, through a change of address
as an ethos of the cinema, a looking directed at the minutiae of decay and disintegration
communal, physical, conceptual and in doing so, makes evident the decay of principles and the
absence of principle that remains. The film constructs the shared totality of the collective farm and
the human types who inhabit it and who have consigned the imagined worlds of their futures to
the mythic promise of a false messiah. The decay and disintegration of this community is then

186
observed in terms close to those of a cinema in which capturing images is an ethos, a disposition,
and a conduct in regard to the world (Nancy 2001: 16).
This technique is centred on the passive-objective movement of the camera through the
spatial relations of the films world. It gives equal measure to the physical and material world
rain, mud, cows, pigs, bricks, walls, landscape, horizons and human forms and maintains a
consistent attention to the existent facts of a material, recognisably real world that at the same
time refuses to conform to the ideal or systematic orders of the worlds the characters may wish to
impose on it. The camera continues to move amongst and to continue to look at a world that for
everything it gives, exposes, or opens up, it persistently withdraws or suspends. The film, and by
extension the film-maker, does not seek to impose themselves on a world they have created or
recognised as if from an outside, a transcendent position of knowledge, but to position themselves
within a milieu that constantly reveals and conceals. The film seeks not to express or represent
particular worlds or to consign their failure to an alternative order of meaning. Rather, the
presentation through visible excess and suspension of concepts as testament to the disintegration
of an idealist metaphysics leaves an exposure, or remainder, that is the syncopation of revelation
and withdrawal that forms the real world of the artwork in Nancys formula. Laura McMahon
summarises this relation between revelation and withdrawal that Nancys perspective on the
cinema makes in relation to a real that does not represent a world but makes the world the
starting point the limit situation for renegotiating meaning.

Exceeding the closure of representation via an opening onto the real, cinema here gives
the world back to itself [] This is a thinking of film which privileges materiality, sense
and contact, whilst interrupting an investment in a metaphysics of immanence, immediacy
and presence. It is a thinking of film which moves beyond subjectivity, propriety and
interiority, emphasising an ethics of the look which elides codes of representation in order
to do justice to the world. Moving between contact and spacing, between revelation and
concealment, and between life and death, Nancys thinking of the real suggests ways in
which the transimmanence of the world manifests itself on film (McMahon 2010: 90).

To elaborate this concept of the real further, and to distinguish it from a sense of the mimetic or
indexical relation to a photographic real, or of a dependence on a real world mise-en-scne, its

187
principles can be extended to another film of worlds disintegrating, Roy Anderssons Songs from
the Second Floor.
Anderssons film is shot almost entirely in a studio using tromp loeil scenic effects, a
heavily applied make-up style and a de-saturated colour palette to create its world through a series
of painterly tableaux reminiscent of early twentieth century painter-caricaturists such as George
Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann; again a non-realistic rendering of human types rather than
individual, dramatic subjects. The camera remains static for each tableau which contains its entire
scene within the duration of each fixed shot. The film comprises around forty of these tableaux,
each configuring a self-contained event or incident, from the minute (a finger trapped in a door)
to the immense (the gathering of the authorities of the state to sacrifice a child). Around twenty
separate characters appear in more than one tableau though not to produce character arcs in the
narrative sense so much as further instances of particular situations. Commenting on the film
Andersson has called his approach a trivialism: life portrayed as a series of trivial components
(Andersson 2004).
Each tableau contributes to an overall picture of a modern mercantile city undergoing
catastrophic breakdown. Inexplicable occurrences of rupture, or of simple processes failing,
steadily increase until they undermine every aspect of the citys means to function. These ruptures
affect all elements of society, both the individual and the institutions of the state. Systems of
exchange and mutual dependence are disintegrating. Long-serving employees are being laid off.
Businesses are failing; a desperate furniture store proprietor burns down his shop in an attempt to
claim the insurance. A magic trick goes wrong. The roads are grinding to a halt; gridlock stifles
the functions of the city. Porsches no longer start. An immigrant is attacked in the street.
Stockbrokers take to the streets in self-flagellating processions. The bosses of the Treasury
desperately gaze into crystal balls searching for guidance. The state church is powerless to offer
answers. The furniture store owner is haunted by the ghost of the friend from whom he borrowed
money and who he failed to repay; a failure that led to suicide. The nation is haunted by the
spectre of its Nazi collaboration during the war a thinly veiled reference to the films Swedish
origin in an otherwise unidentified modern mercantile city. In the end the combined forces of the
state government, business, academia, church and military come together in a bid to stem the
breakdown. In the films most macabre and blackly comic scene a young girl is sacrificed in a set-
piece tableau of 2500 figures. The film eventually ends with Kalle, the furniture shop owner and

188
the films most recurrent character, standing in a wasteland, only a flat horizon, the distant city
and a foreground refuse dump around him. A despondent salesman who tried to offload plastic
crucifixes on Kalle at an earlier trade fair arrives, flinging the many unsold Jesuses onto the dump.
Left alone again, Kalle gazes toward the horizon. From the wasteland and visually reminiscent of
Gances Jaccuse the dead begin to rise. Steadily they advance towards Kalle, oblivious or
unconcerned by his presence. There the film ends.
Visually, each tableau is a deliberate obliteration of the identity of place. Stntang
surrounded its protagonists in the helplessness of distance, the vast empty panorama of the
Hungarian plain that cuts them off from contact, that which can only exist beyond the geographic
horizon and so, therefore, from beyond a vision of the world to that of a visionary world. Songs
from the Second Floor encloses its protagonists in the kind of non-places of which Marc Aug has
written: modern, uniform, universal mercantile spaces devoid of unique, particular or historically
specific elements (Aug 1995). Each tableau is rendered as an intersection of walls, corridors,
grid-locked street corners, the interiors of offices, apartments or hotel rooms with no discernible
view from the window. Architectural space is formed from intersecting planes, of the surface of
obstacles, each remaining anonymous recognisably universal but in no way particular. The city
could be imagined as being located anywhere or everywhere in the modern world. It is here that
Nancys real is not dependent on a realistic image. The artwork is real as a surface in contact
with the perceptual world in the same manner as a painting. It is in this shift of emphasis away
from a real as an indexical link to a profilmic reality and illusion as a representational
configuration of aesthetics that underpins Nancys conception of the real and as such, can bring
together two stylistically opposite films such as Stntang and Songs from the Second Floor. Whilst
one determinedly and excessively foregrounds the material qualities of the real world and the
other expresses itself through a deliberate formal artifice, both films trace the pure form of the
presentation of sense that is withdrawn or separated distinct as a form or image. The image,
then, in Nancys wider scheme encompasses all art forms, not only the visual but equally the
tactile, cinematic, sonorous, choreographic and so on. Nancy uses the term distinct in the
opening essay of The Ground of the Image. In Ian James summary, the image touches us; in its
sensible form or line (trait) it has an affective force or intensity which makes sense but does not
articulate any determinate meaning (James 2006: 228). In Nancys own words:

189
Each image is a singular variation on the totality of distinct sense of sense which does
not enchain the order of significations. Each image is a finite cutting out, by the mark of
distinction. The superabundance of images in the multiplicity and in the history of the arts
corresponds to this inexhaustible distinction. But each time, and at the same time, it is the
jouissance of meaning, the jolt and the taste of its tension: a little sense in a pure state,
infinitely opened or infinitely lost (however one wishes to say it) (Nancy 2005: 12).

Rosalind Galt has observed that, Nancy refuses any Platonic suspicion of image-making in favor of
a Heideggarian concern for how the image stages existence, being in the world (Galt 2008).
Whether configured as the perpetual, gradual, continuously moving sequence shots that constitute
Stntang, or as the precise, painterly, static tableaux of Songs from the Second Floor, the overriding
factor is neither that of a particular characteristic of the image (mimesis or artifice, realism or
spectacle) nor a matter of the order or articulation of signification as a logic of meaning. Instead,
both films assert, through the disintegration of the particular worlds they create, an excess of
recognition that is, at the same time, cut adrift from the formula of interpretation. Each film, as an
artwork in Nancys broadest sense, is distinct, an exposure and withdrawal of those aspects in and
of the image that separate themselves from the worlds of meaning and of things. Each film
highlights recognisably human types without recourse to psychological or subjective paradigms or
the logic of causes and effects. They describe always already recognisable conditions of human
experience, of human contradictions, assembled within the fabric of a broader accumulation of
limit situations the faith placed in the false messiah or the exchange-value and sacrifice of a
modern mercantile system.
We can recall, from the same essay The Image-The Distinct, Nancys use of the word
methexis: a participation or a contagion through which the image seizes us (Nancy 2005: 9). This
is the force and impetus of the cinematic suspense within the films accumulation of images and
sequences. Likewise, in both films it is the simple, trivial, instantly recognisable human
duplicity or catching a finger in a door that is at the same time exposed without judgement,
without an order of signification, only its incommensurability and its inscrutability. It appears, and
separates, and conceals through the persistent accumulation of the films looking. Disintegration
and the violence of forces conflicting against each other cut to the heart of this methexis. Images of
violence and destruction, suffering and misery both fascinate and repel. In a second essay from The

190
Ground of the Image, Nancy observes it must also be admitted that not only violence but the
extreme violence of cruelty hovers at the edge of the image, of all images (Nancy 2005: 24). This
is not a measure of the represented violence of an image, the measure of its bloodshed, so-to-
speak, but rather the violence of the rupture that separates the image from world and at the same
time uncouples that world from signification by its separation. The image is not a calm surface of
representation (Nancy 2005: 22) but an exposed fragment of the world, of sense, at the limits of
signification.
The question of disintegration and the violence of contradiction presented within both of
these films is formulated on the precision given to looking at the instances of contradiction,
violence and rupture. Nancy continues: The ambiguity of the image and of violence of the
violence at work in the image and of the image opening itself in violence is the ambiguity of the
monstration of the ground (Nancy 2005: 25); the ground, or distinct, is shown as the separation,
the opening onto groundlessness in opposition to the image that is delivered out of an enclosed
ground (Nancy 2005: 26).
In each film, beneath all of the occurrences of confrontation, duplicity, contradiction, or
individual acts of cruelty is a greater violence and systemic disintegration. It is not given over to a
specific set of criteria whether as the necessity of law, problem solving, manipulation for a
purpose, or individual psychology. It remains irreducible to causes or effects. As such, both films
implicitly refer to the central myth of violence at the heart of the mystery of religion through their
messianic figures of redemption and the sacrifice. What disintegrates in each case is the ability of
these myths to effect a salvation, restitution or reconciliation. What remains in each case the
content of the films looking is the suspense of the message of passive suffering. If violence is a
force that is measured by the image of its effects, Stntang and Songs from the Second Floor seek to
suspend those effects in their threat and imminence pointing to such threat and imminence as
the structure of being. If divine violence is the recognition of the force of sacrifice in the effect of
redemption, or the recognition of the violence of the force of law is found in the effect of
punishment, such corresponding images are absent, or withdrawn, in both films. Only the decay
of their myths is exposed in their accumulative structures; a looking without in Nancys terms
a vision as the Idea or concept to be represented.
This violence of disintegration is structurally returned to the question of looking into
obscurity that made itself apparent in The Asthenic Syndrome, Palms and Russian Ark. In Stntang the

191
obscurity of the vision of the false messiah leaves only, foregrounded, the excess of a movement of
imminence that never completes itself. In the end, the film itself must arrest its own perpetual
movement by the literal obscuring of its own frame from within the diegesis of the film. The
doctor, at the end, boards up his own window from where he has continually watched and waited
on the collectives actions. The window, the frame, the access to the world and the horizon is
sealed over. In Songs from the Second Floor, in something of a reverse, the film opens up a horizon at
last. After the intersection and slicing of perspectives in the city, the city is now viewed as a tiny
blot on an otherwise featureless horizon. However, that is the moment when the vision of a future
is obscured by the return of the past. The dead rise up in number. Some we have seen and can
identify from the films various tableaux, led by the sacrificed girl. Many more are unidentified
but speak of countless unrecorded dead. They walk somnambulantly towards Kalle and the
camera, threatening to swamp and obscure the image and block the frame like a wave.
What Stntang and Songs from the Second Floor suggest is not the destruction of the world
as such, but an opening onto a sense of the construction of particular worlds, that may in a
variety of ways resemble our own familiar world. The limit situation of this construction, the
formula of myths and symbols and the overarching alignment of total destruction and suffering as
the consequence of belief in false systems of redemption, does not represent the means to recover
traditional values or assert new modes of overcoming. The interruption of these symbols and the
orientation of the films presentation their detailed attention to the minutiae of disruption and
disintegration of values is an opening onto a sense of world exposed as the raw data of
experience. What is carried over, in the waiting, the deferral and suspension of ends and, it
should be argued, the retention of horizons as limits that need to be looked towards, is the
unfulfilled demand for redemption. Where sin as idolatry is exposed, this sense does not
appeal to the instigation of new positivities but resides in the recognition of the negatives of
experience.

192
CHAPTER 9

Sin: Werckmeister Harmonies

The last chapter referred to Paul Ricoeurs notion of sin as humanitys turning away from the
divine towards itself. This leads to an idolatry and vanity that incurs the Wrath of God. This myth
was interrupted in Stntang and Songs from the Second Floor through the disruption, disintegration
and decay of the habitus of communal structures and the orders of signification. In turn, these
disruptions result in an exposure of sense as the excess of material and conceptual imagery that
could only be continually looked at via an orientation of waiting and deferral. This looking was
accentuated by the films own endings which emphasise the look over and above the conceptual or
narrative ending by means of the obscuring and reflecting of vision rather than the assertion of a
fixed, new or redeemed state.
This chapter develops these notions in relation to another of Bla Tarrs films, his
subsequent one, Werckmeister Harmonies, which, it will be argued, addresses another of Ricoeurs
myths relating to sin that of the division of body and soul, or what Ricoeur calls, the myth
of the exiled soul and salvation through knowledge (Ricoeur 1967: 279). Ricoeur states that this
myth forms the one which all anthropological dualism endeavors to transpose and rationalize
(Ricouer 1967: 279). This myth divides man into soul and body; it is on the basis of this myth
that man understands himself as the same as his soul and other than his body. (Ricoeur 1967:
279).
However, it is precisely this anthropological dualism that has been challenged in several
deconstructive approaches in philosophy, summarised by Ian James, as Nietzches genealogy of
Christian-Platonic thought, Heideggers conception of metaphysics as the history of onto-
theology, Derridas logocentrism, and so on (James 2006: 134). This so on points, in
particular, to Jean-Luc Nancys working through of Christian and Christological motifs that seek
to challenge the concept of self-overcoming at the heart of the Western tradition. As James
observes, Nancy seeks to reconfigure the dualistic separation of spirit and body and the
privileging of one over the other in a hierarchical relation to consider instead the pair
body/spirit as a fusion, a consubstantiality (James 2006: 136). Nancy argues, against the

193
Christian and similarly Cartesian attempt to sanctify the spirit over and above the body, that it
is based on an indeterminate status. James notes: If we were entirely fallen bodies there would be
no spirit within us to sanctify, if we were entirely spiritual there would be no mortal fleshy desires
to satisfy (James 2006: 140). For Nancy, then, spirit can be replaced with the formula of sense
a thinking of world-hood and being-in-common that is both embodied and separate, both
present and withdrawn (James 2006: 140).
At the same time, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has posed a similarly post-
Heideggerian question of the body/soul split, this time with a focus on the political separation of
the instinctual, animal, element of humankind and its spiritual, intellectual, human element as
opposition.

In our culture, man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a
body and a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a
supernatural or social or divine element. We must learn instead to think of man as what
results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical
mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation
(Agamben 2004: 16).

It is this question of the separation and the presentation and withdrawal of the human/animal,
spirit/body split that, this chapter argues, is a dominant aspect of Werckmeister Harmonies. Its final
image presents the human and animal face to face: the camera, following the musician Eszter,
slowly tracks along the surface of the stuffed whale that has formed the locus of catastrophe in the
film, until it draws parallel with the creatures, dead, unblinking eye. Eszter faces the
impenetrable creature then turns away. After a final look, he exits the frame and the huge, dead
creature is consumed in swirling fog. It is within this final juxtaposition that Werckmeister Harmonies
seeks to disrupt the myth of the triumph of spirit over body and to expose the sense of one and
the other as the site of human being-in-common.
Like Stntang, Werckmeister Harmonies is an adaptation from a novel by Lszl
Krasznahorkai (who collaborated on both scripts), and renders an even more mysterious
configuration of events than the earlier film. Where Stntang maintained a relatively simple

194
plot of duplicity and exploitation at its heart, Werckmeister Harmonies develops themes that hint
allusively at the cosmological and the humanistic.
The films content revolves around the arrival in a small Hungarian town of a circus
featuring a huge stuffed whale as its central exhibit. This circus is presided over by a mysterious
figure called The Prince, who is witnessed only as a shadow. He is overheard to incite anarchy by
the films principle protagonist, Valushka. However, the town has already been rife with rumours
among its population of an eclipse and apocalyptic prognostications of imminent catastrophe.
Whether the arrival of The Prince and the subsequent collapse into riot, violence and destruction
is directly linked to the circus or whether the violence that occurs is a symptom of its own
momentum remains the films central mystery. Further themes of cosmological, musical and
political disturbance punctuate the film. Valushka, the town postman, assumes the figure of a
witness, moving through the films progression of rumour, disturbance, riot and subsequent
martial law implicitly he is the films holy fool. However, how innocent a witness Valushka may
ultimately be is another of the films secrets. In the opening scene, Valushka choreographs a group
of late-night drunks in a bar into a pattern of celestial bodies as a means to demonstrate the
eclipse. Thereafter, Valushka visits Eszter, a musician who has been working on a project to
return the harmonic system to what he proclaims is its original truth, following its corruption by
the system of constant-tempered tuning the traditional twelve-note system that replaces a
discordant truth with an harmonic order. Valushka becomes the go-between when a malevolent
opportunist, Eszters ex-wife Tnde, seeks to gain political control of the town with the aid of her
lover, the chief of police, in the midst of the towns paranoia. It is Valushka who witnesses the
build-up of crowds in the town square and he is present when the crowds tension finally erupts
into rioting, marching on a hospital and embarking on an orgy of destruction and violence. In its
immediate aftermath, Valushka finds and reads a journal of the nights violent events, though
whether this is his own testimony is, again, inconclusive.
Once the rioting has been quelled by martial law in which Tnde appears to be
instrumental Valushka is warned that the authorities are searching for him. As he tries to escape
the town he is intercepted by a military helicopter. Eszter, seemingly coerced into obedience to
the towns new authorities, visits Valushka, now apparently mentally broken and in a hospital.
Eszter states he has abandoned his musical studies and re-tuned the piano to traditional harmonics.
Eszter walks alone through the debris-strewn town square, now emptied of people. The whale has

195
been abandoned amid the remains of the riot. Eszter looks it in the eye then walks across the
square obscured in what is either fog, or the billowing smoke of the ravaged town.
Again, Tarrs technique privileges a meticulous use of measured, slow and lengthy
sequence shots that move dispassionately and objectively before, around and between the
movements and actions depicted. This is nowhere more evident than in the riot that takes place in
the hospital. The camera glides within the midst of the mob as it surges through corridors and into
rooms, overturning furniture and assaulting the helpless inmates. It turns this way and that,
glimpsing violence and destruction but never lingering. It sets out to emphasise the duration and
the hypnotic rhythm of the mob rather than dwell on individual perpetrators or victims. Neither
does the continuous, uncut movement allow for any conventional articulation of action and
reaction, empathy or motive. John Orr emphasises the effect of this technique through the
mathematics involved: In an age when the average US movie contains 1,100 shots per 100
minutes, Werckmeister has an improbable 39 shots in 145 minutes (Orr 2001: 22).
Such minimal edits and lengthy sequences construct a series of mysteries: not only are
there the questions over the role of the circus and the shadowy Prince as the catalyst for the
gathering of the crowds and the towns descent into riot, but there is also the possibility of the
eclipse or Eszters tampering with the harmonic system as further disturbances to the fabric of the
towns order. Indeed, Ezsters actions may only coincidentally suggest the figure of an
intelligentsia obsessing over abstractions as the town is taken over by the political machinations of
a reactionary element. The source of the journal of the night of destruction remains a mystery,
along with Valushkas part in the proceedings. When the riot suddenly loses its momentum, its
energy seemingly spent at the sight of a helpless, naked old man, and the mob somnambulantly
disperses, the camera turns and pauses, revealing Valushka hiding in the shadows a witness or
orchestrator? Perhaps the biggest mystery that the film invites its viewers to contemplate is set out
in the lengthy opening scene of the drunks in the bar. As Valushka directs them in the movements
of the celestial spheres, he says, All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness where
constancy, quietude and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine that in this infinite
sonorous silence everywhere is an impenetrable darkness. Moreover, in Valushkas later
invitation to Eszter to visit the whale, he says, all a man can do is look upon it and see how great
is the Lords creative impulse and power, and how omnipotence is reflected in that animal. Thats
what has to be looked at, must be seen, Uncle Gyuri.

196
The scene at the close of the film, when, after visiting Valushka in the hospital, Eszter
finally visits the whale and pauses, facing its inscrutable eye, mirrors the earlier shot of Valushka:
when he first encounters the whale, revealed inside its truck, he moves along its side until he is
facing it, gazing into its eye. The camera takes up the same position in both shots, framing the
human and the animal turned toward each other, facing each other and accentuating the space in
between; an in-between of darkness and of fog. The bottomlessness which Valushka invites the
drunks and perhaps humanity to contemplate is this in between.
Stephen Mulhall has drawn attention to the in between of the human and animal that
Heidegger highlights as the bottomless condition of Being: for Heidegger, that which apparently
distinguishes human and animal modes of being (our freedom, which presupposes a knowledge of
good and evil, and makes individuality possible) is also what relates us to them (Mulhall 2005a:
83). Mulhall further states how this configuration, of the enigmatically perverse animality of the
human is a recasting by Heidegger of the Christian myth of the Fall (Mulhall 2005a: 84).
Heidegger claims that the human being effectively suppresses its original animal nature and then
turns that internal animality into an external figure of inner perversity, an essentially nonhuman
element within the human that is always enigmatic and threatens our humanity through drives and
desires that produce increasingly primitive responses to the world. At the same time, this
animality informs our sense of achievement of our humanness through its equally enigmatic
provision of interest in the world and in ourselves: a fallen state (Mulhall 2005a: 83).
As was stated above, Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, both following and
developing Heidegger, have gone furthest in locating this Christian myth of body and soul,
sensible and intelligible, animal and human as the locus of Western metaphysics and the need,
therefore, to think the terms of separation itself rather than remain within the narrative of its
overcoming. Agamben calls this orientation the anthropological machine of humanism (Agamben
2004: 29). He refers to the mysterious conjunction of, and ultimate dominance by, a supernatural
social or divine element over and above a natural living body, claiming it needs to be rethought as
a separation. In both cases, each theorist focuses on the suspension or the in-between of this
conjunction in an attempt to prise open a space that configures, in Agambens terminology, a
bare life (Agamben 2004, 38) that may point to the exposure of a finite embodied sense as the
limits for thinking existence.

197
If, then, on the surface, the martial law and the aftermath of destruction that configures
the apparent end of Werckmeister Harmonies suggests a destructive and reactionary inevitability,
the films recurrent and final image of the mysterious gulf between the human and the implacable
animal may invite a deeper concentration of the means to be human than any narrative restitution
or reconciliation of the human over the animal, whose traditions are more conventionally
privileged in the cinema.
Catastrophe is a central motif in the cinemas lengthy formulation of the human spirit and
its indomitable triumph over the lesser, bestial aspects of its nature. Moreover, it is underpinned
by its implicitly Christological roots in so many scenarios of apocalypse, natural disaster and
survival. A staple of the disaster movie is the survival of the human remnant, through the
ingenuity of intellect and spirit in the face of catastrophe where others turn to violence and
destruction. A vast genre of commercial films, of which 2012 (2009) is merely the latest (and
overtly Biblical) example, testifying to this. The remnant is even more explicit in the sub-genre of
the post-apocalyptic film in which the Earth, ravaged by catastrophe or war, is populated by
survivors reduced to primitive drives in the struggle to regain a foothold on life. George Millers
Mad Max trilogy (1979-1985), with its violence, feral children and primitive chaos represents the
archetype. Although, in this vein, Kevin Costners The Postman (1997), with its opportunist hero
masquerading as the eponymous mail carrier and apparent agent of re-formed government that
ultimately represents the agent of communication and therefore civilisation, provides a clear
example of the longevity of the messianic myth of humanistic salvation in a violent, primal world.
An explicit example of the traditional human/animal split can be seen in the British
science fiction film Quatermass and the Pit (1967), whose plot revolves around the discovery, buried
under a bomb-damaged underground station, of an alien spacecraft as immense, silent and
implacable as Werckmeisters whale.
Quatermass and the Pit first appeared as a television series broadcast by the BBC in 1959. It
was the third in a series of stories written by Nigel Kneale involving the eponymous rocket
scientist, Professor Quatermass. It was remade as a feature film by the Hammer studios in 1967.
Nigel Kneale has discussed the source of the descent into chaos and violence that overtakes the
population of London, identifying the race riots that occurred in the city during the 1950s after
the initial phase of Jamaican immigration. Kneale claimed in a television interview in 1996 that he
sought to explain mans savagery and intolerance by way of images that had been throbbing away

198
in the human brain since it first developed. Racial unrest, violence, purges I tried to speculate
on where they came from (in Pixley 2005). Kneales solution was to retell the story of the
animal/human, body/soul configuration.
The plot of Quatermass and the Pit transposes the question of a consubstantiality of body and
soul to both an extraterrestrial and a genetic origin. That is, the fusion of the human containment
of instinct and a nonhuman, alien, biological drive toward violence and self-destruction is played
out as a story of overcoming linked to the extraterrestrial insemination of humanity.
During work on the London Underground a mysterious cylinder is unearthed. As it is not
recognisable as any German ordinance left over from the Second World War, Professor
Quatermass is brought in to investigate its possible extraterrestrial origins. The cylinder is located
under the fictional Hobbs Lane, so named for its etymological links with the Devil. The
unearthing of the cylinder begins to effect elements of the local populace and civil unrest steadily
increases. Violence and rioting occur nationwide and certain members of the community,
including Quatermass himself, find themselves overwhelmed by primal, violent drives.
Quatermass links the old stories of Devilish occurrences at the site through history to the effects of
the cylinder. Eventually, after the discovery of the remains of an alien creature inside the object, it
is revealed to be a craft from a long extinct Martian race of insect-like creatures. Driven by an
instinctive death-drive that annihilated their own planet, the aliens visited Earth millennia before.
There they mixed their genes with those of various strains of ape. The evolutionary outcome of
this event has led to the strains of modern human variously receptive to the instinctual drives of
their buried alien genes. The schematic breakdown of this has manifested itself in three of the
plots principal characters: a military officer who ultimately succumbs entirely to the alien
influence; a palaeontologist, assisting Quatermass, whose genes are entirely unaffected; and
Quatermass himself, who is partially affected. Therefore, Quatermass discovers that it is his own
heredity, and the nonhuman within the human, against which he must battle. With London
reduced to chaos and anarchy, its skyline aflame, Quatermass appears helpless. Only a final act of
selfless sacrifice from the still rational palaeontologist finally overcomes the force of evil. The
palaeontologist dies but in so doing disintegrates with electricity the force that, due to the
spectacular necessity of cinema, has taken on a visual form the ghostly shimmering and horned
face of a devil looming vast in the night sky over London. The film effectively reiterates a lengthy
pictorial heritage of visualising the relationship between the animal and human, and the underlying

199
devilish mythology it administers, that has prevailed throughout the history of western
representative art.
Andrew Benjamin, in an essay responding to Giorgio Agambens The Open: Man and
Animal, identifies two such images: a painting by Piero della Francesca and an engraving by Drer.
In the first, from 1496, Saint Michael is portrayed having slain the devil, represented by a snake-
like creature described with the inscription dragon the word, as Benjamin argues, having
become flesh reinforces the incorporated refusal of the animal (Benjamin 2008: 72). In Drers
engraving, Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), the devil has taken on a more familiar form, the
cloven-footed and horned human-animal form as it tempts the virtuous knight. The distinction
Benjamin makes with respect to the two images is that in the first, the saint has deemed it
necessary to kill the animal; in the second, the knight only remains vigilant against the threat of
the animal. The human has absorbed and at the same time excluded the animal.
In the Quatermass film version the temporal logic of the cinema, its traditional narrative
drive, re-invokes the Christological logic of ends through the need to position the
alien/animal/devils death in relation to the human and the humans overcoming of the animal.
Quatermass and the Pit accentuates this Christological structure even further with the additional
formula of the ultimate sacrifice in return for total salvation. As Benjamin reads the Drer image,
animality is reflected as a part of being human and therefore emphasises the recognition and co-
existence of the human and animal which requires vigilance on the part of the human. In this
second configuration, the animal is not seen to be killed but is presented as dead to us by its
silence in the realm of logos (Benjamin 2008: 76). In this version the animal taking on a more
abstract quality implies consubstantiality and a division for which the human must claim
dominance through suppression. It is in this second version, of the animal as silent but present
or in terms reminiscent of Nancy, as the animal that is presented and withdrawn that the figure
of the whale in Werckmeister Harmonies begins to take on the figure of this silent presence.
Giorgio Agambens anthropological machine of Western metaphysics refers to a logic
that is historical. The suspension of this logic coincides with the present hiatus of the post-
historical conditions of the contemporary world. Agambens political inflection argues that it is
the historical factors that produced the relations between the human and animal, or non-human,
and that these are configured in two phases. In its earliest version, as symbolised in Drers
engraving, the animal is separated and contained within the human as a form of religious vigilance

200
and suppression. In its modern version (which is the basis of his larger philosophical project of the
homo sacer, Agamben 1995) the animal within the human is externalised and isolated. This
concept reiterates the other central theme of Agambens philosophy, that of the state of
exception developed from Walter Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History: the state of
emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule (Benjamin 1999: 248). In Homo
Sacer, Agamben developed this theme as a biopolitics the identification of a bare life that is
separated and excluded through the creation of the conditions of exception, a space in which the
law is suspended and characterised most explicitly by the death camp. In The Open: Man and
Animal, Agamben sets out to develop the state of exception as an ontological category, beyond the
political in Homo Sacer, and located in the western metaphysics of anthropogenesis (Agamben
2004: 79). He argues that metaphysics is itself, the meta that completes and preserves the
overcoming of the animal physis in the direction of human history and is not a single event but a
constant recurrence of the decision between human and animal, nature and history (Agamben
2004: 79).
Following from Heidegger, Agamben claims that Being, or world the relation that
underpins Heideggers formula for openness, the oppositional but never quite coincidental
pairing of concealment-unconcealment, earth-world (in Inwood 2000: 119) are not ideal
concepts separated from the animal environment. The open is revealed by the interruption of the
terms by which animality is suspended within the systems of order or signification (Agamben
2004: 79). In Agambens overall argument, the anthropological machine that defines the
becoming historical of the human being leads to two conditions: the first, that which preoccupied
Heidegger at the end of his career, claims that humankind no longer attempts to preserve its
animality but aims to control it by means of technology (a formula that has been extended to
organ farming and genetic engineering); in the second, Agambens predominant thesis,
humankind neither hides nor masters its own animality but subjects it to a pure abandonment
through the process of exception (a principle operated especially in the political arena, in extremis
in the death camps of the Second World War, but applicable to configurations of immigration and
anti-terrorism in the present era) (Agamben 2004: 80). Agambens further proposition, with
respect to the present era, is that: [i]f the anthropological machine was the motor for mans
becoming historical, the end of philosophy and the completion of the epochal destinations of being
mean that today the machine is idling (Agamben 2004: 80).

201
In his critique Andrew Benjamin acknowledges the proposition of the state of exception
(otherwise referred to interchangeably as a space of exception or a zone of indistinction
(Benjamin 2008: 78) and elsewhere by Agamben, a zone of absolute indeterminacy (Agamben
2005: 57)) as the original and provocative aspect of Agambens project. The moment in which the
division between the human and the animal that has configured the structure of human being in
western thought is suspended, it presents an empty space, a caesura, that reveals neither a
uniquely animal life nor uniquely human life but the category of bare life a life that is
separated and excluded from itself (in Benjamin 2008: 78). For Benjamin, however, the caesura
is less an empty space waiting to be filled by a new human beyond the hold of identity (that
which he criticises as Agambens utopianism, Benjamin 2008: 79) than a porous border across
which the human and its animality must constantly negotiate (Benjamin 2008: 78).
It is here that we might place Tarrs film, as an aesthetics of looking that seeks to expose
the limit situation, or borders, of the human and animal that are consistently crossed in the
incorporation of the human. Again, we can suggestively recall Nancys configuration of the limit
situation that exposes sense a sense of being human as the relation of the human and animal,
which Nancy would regard as an ethos, a broader configuration of representation in the West than
Agambens narrower, specifically political focus.
Quatermass and the Pit seeks to project the conditions of its story beyond the ethos to the
genetic and hereditary, to biological death-drives and the ultimate triumph of a purely human
species of intelligence; a condition, moreover, that manages to conflate this humanism with an
apocalyptic and Christological mythology. As such, it seeks to project the human, and human
salvation, into the possibilities for a destiny that is a form of life the perfectability of the human
rather than as a negotiation or a form of coexistence.
Werckmeister Harmonies, for its part, presents the void or limit situation that is the
configuration of the political terms of coexistence. That the films narrative ends in the apparent
triumph of the most reactionary elements of the towns community, in martial law and the seizure
of power by some over others, serves as both a warning and a suggestive commentary on the
political norm that is at stake. Martial law represents the mastery of the violent, the primal, the
animal as it erupts within the town, by a larger, more brutal force. Military vehicles and personnel
loiter on street corners towards the end of the film; a helicopter captures the fleeing Valushka.

202
However, the violence that brought martial law to bear on the town is presented in its
fundamental mystery within the film. One can only conjecture as to whether the violence of the
mob can be said to be revolutionary or destructive. The incitement by The Prince, seemingly
testified to by Valushkas reading of the notebook found in the ruins, contains no motive or self-
justification, no figure of oppression or necessary resistance. The contents of the notebook are
fragmentary and seemingly contradictory: There is construction in all ruins he is reported to
have said, in the wake of the violence. And yet he proclaims: A single emotion for destruction,
implacable, deadly. He says he likes it when things fall apart but he doesnt say why. The Prince
says, What they build and what they will build, what they do and what they will do, is delusion
and lies. But again, the report does not make it clear if the they is a reference to the rioters or to
those reactionary forces who held power before or who hold power after. One line of the
testimony speaks of the animal at loose within the human: We didnt find the real object of our
abhorrence and despair, so we rushed at everything we came across with wilder and wilder fury.
This wilder fury, the riot that reaches its pitch in the destruction of the hospital, also finds
its crucial turning point and its dissipation when confronted by the naked figure of a withered old
man an image of bare life as such of the human form in all its helplessness, fragility and
vulnerability. In the midst of the violence that takes place within the corridors and rooms of the
hospital, rioters suddenly cease, one by one standing still. The camera does not change its pace or
steady movement, it simply glides between the frozen figures to finally turn into a bare concrete
and tiled room to reveal the old man. The camera lingers before it begins to pull back. As it does
so, it joins the throng of rioters, now quelled, and filing steadily, impassively out of the building.
There is no cut, no change of pace by the camera, simply the continuation of the same
dispassionate rhythm of observation.
Like the movement of the camera in the midst of Sokurovs crowd leaving the Hermitage,
that turns from its midst into a side-opening, so too does Tarrs camera. But instead of exiting
with the throng of people into an obscurity of fog, Tarrs camera turns into the shadows and to the
face of the partially lit Valushka looking on: his emotions unreadable. Whether witness or
participant, Valushka is now merely the surface of the human face looking back. Valushkas face
displays no clear expression whether horror, empathy, remorse, fear, or whatever instead, it
remains implacable for the brief moment that it appears from the shadows and the film cuts away.

203
This refusal of a representative image of response to events is characteristic of the
continual being in suspense that Tarrs film maintains among all its characters. It is the principle
technique that Tarr administers in both Stntang and Werckmeister Harmonies; a coalescing of
content and method that consistently presents and withdraws the symbolic and conceptual, or
mythic formulae, to leave only the material and the embodied. The shadowy gulf that separates
the human from the animal, repeated in the image of both Valushka and Eszter face to face with
the implacable whale, perhaps signals the void into which the film invites the viewer. It is not a
great mythological or cosmological void of meaning and nothingness, of chaos and order, but that
which interrupts and separates the human from the animal. It suspends the narrative drive of
representation that insists on the final image of distinction and overcoming (Quatermass and
Christianitys devil). In its fundamental act of looking at the means of violence without objectives,
causes or judgements, Werckmeister Harmonies is itself a testimony, as Nancy might suggest, to the
act of looking at the real of violence returned to us before its symbolisation.

204
CHAPTER 10

Guilt: Dog Days, You the Living, Import Export

The final phase of Paul Ricoeurs developmental progression leads from defilement, through sin,
to guilt. Guilt is the internalisation of fault, the recognition within oneself of fallibility and
therefore resides in a mode of confession. Recalling Karl Simms summary of this progression,
in defilement I accuse another, in sin I am accused, but in guilt I accuse myself (Simms 2003:
23): it is here that a conscience takes over from the wrath of God or the primordial chaos of
eternal events. Guilt emphasises the ethical more than the religious, not so much answerable to
God but answerable towards other people (Simms 2003: 23). But Ricoeur argues that although
the promotion of guilt may produce a circle of condemnation, this should not be the case.
Condemnation only appears after an event and only to the justified conscience; this is merely a
pedagogy. To the conscience still kept under the guard of the law, writes Ricoeur, that is, a
sense of guilt, its real meaning is unknown (Ricoeur 1967: 150).
Here, then, we might recall Stephen Mulhalls identification of the incomprehensible
figure of redemption in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein; that is, the
movement away from Ricoeurs relation to the divine or theological symbol and toward a
spiritual or intellectual practice:

We stand incomprehensibly in need of redemption, and we are incomprehensibly able to


achieve it, through a certain kind of intellectual practice that is also a spiritual practice
[] a practice of enduring and embodying the human beings constitutive resistance to its
own grasp (Mulhall 2005a: 12).

In this chapter, the focus is on three films that circulate around themes of guilt and suffering.
Austrian director Ulrich Seidls first feature film, Dog Days, and Swedish director Roy Anderssons
follow-up to Songs from the Second Floor, called You the Living, might well be described as enduring
and embodying the human beings constitutive resistance to its own grasp. Both films are
structured as a series of vignettes of multiple characters unconnected by the cause/effect or

205
action/reaction relations of traditional narrative. What connects these people, occupying spaces in
the characterless, quotidian architectures of modern European cities (one, the suburbs of Vienna,
the other, a continuation of the trompe loeil studio facsimiles of a post-war Sweden) is a matter
of theme: that is, the peoples persistent means of antagonism, contradiction, struggle and an
apparent disowning of their own best interests. The final film, Seidls Import Export, it will be
argued, also presents guilt as a central theme. The key questions will be: how are the motifs and
symbols of guilt integrated into the films and how do the films techniques, their relations of
looking and framing, relate to guilts concept of self-accusation and confession?
Once again, we will find Nancys suggestive configuration of the interrupted myth, or
the refusal, suspension or excess of sense giving onto an experiential real unfulfilled by
interpretative logic or judgement. What Nancy calls an axiomatics of a way of looking (Nancy
2001: 14) as a regard for the world of sense will be translated into a form of discomfort in the
films, a gaze that neither judges through distanciation nor determines meaning or judgement
through cause and effect.
In Dog Days, a violently jealous young man beats up anyone who looks at his beauty-queen
girlfriend. Finally, he turns his rage on her. An elderly widower, in a constant dispute with his
unseen neighbours, tries to turn his housekeeper into his dead wife. Later, his dog is mysteriously
poisoned. A husband and wife, estranged since the loss of their daughter in a traffic accident,
continue to share the same house, deliberately antagonising one another. The woman visits sex
clubs and makes love to a visiting masseur with her husband still in the house, trying to make his
presence felt with the constant bouncing of a tennis ball. A home security salesman visits various
households, his patter loaded with societys potential threats to person and property. A middle-
aged woman is visited by her abusive boyfriend and his drunken friend. They humiliate her. Later,
the friend returns offering to take revenge on the womans behalf. He abuses her boyfriend at
gunpoint and only stops when the woman breaks down and declares her love for her violent
boyfriend. These vignettes are punctuated by scenes of a young woman, Anna, who hangs around
the car parks of suburban shopping malls, persuading drivers to give her lifts. Once in their cars
she continually asks intrusive personal questions or rifles through their belongings. The films
slender structural arc thus involves Anna and Hruby, the security salesman. After a client has his
car scratched Hruby is bullied into maintaining a lookout. To solve his problem, Hruby identifies
Anna as the culprit and takes her to an empty holiday chalet. There she is abused by several car

206
owners and raped by Hrubys bullying client. After several scorching hot days there is a violent
thunderstorm. The film ends with Anna, alone in a street at night, running from driveway to
driveway setting off the automatic security lights.
Roy Anderssons You the Living continues the visual style of his earlier Songs from the Second
Floor: a reduced palette of frosty yellow-greys, cadaverous make-up effects and static, painterly
tableaux constructed in studio sets. However, the principal difference between the two films is
that whereas Songs from the Second Floor targeted the large and abstract organisations of the State,
You the Living homes in on the minute details of particular human tribulations. Many of the
tableaux occur only once: a single sight-gag, a moment of conflict, difficulty, awkwardness or
failure. These can be as simple or seemingly banal as missing a lift or joining the wrong ticket
queue, being stuck in the rain because a bus shelter is full, the problem of noisy neighbours or the
difficulties of taking a dog for a walk in old age. On other occasions, there are displays of human
selfishness: a woman complains continually that no-one likes her whilst drinking heavily and
insulting the hospitality and care of her stoical boyfriends ageing mother. A son pesters his
hardworking father for money, a situation that is clearly a persistent aspect of their relationship. A
psychiatrist describes the futility of trying to make people happy as a profession and ponders his
own happiness as he goes home alone. In other instances, the tiniest inflections of impromptu
justice are provocatively hinted at: a self-obsessed and boorish businessman shows off in a
restaurant while his wallet is stolen from him. An arrogant businessman racially abuses an
immigrant barber, only for the barber to exact his revenge through the means of a haircut. In
recurrent sequences, emotional distress fuels further longings: a young lovelorn woman dreams of
a marriage to a charismatic rock guitarist. A tuba player cannot stop worrying about money during
sex with his wife. A school teacher cries in front of her pupils after an argument with her husband,
who, filled with remorse, expresses the argument and his remorse to his customers in his carpet
shop. A company director drops dead in a meeting; his wife makes a lengthy plea to the altar in
church as the priest and fellow worshippers become increasingly annoyed and impatient at the
length of her prayer. A builder narrates a dream of social and class embarrassment: an attempt to
perform the tablecloth trick at a large family gathering. His failure, with the destruction of the
family china, leads to his being sentenced to the electric chair after a hellish trial before beer-
swilling judges. Finally, the film is framed within a dream of destruction: at the beginning a man
confesses he had a nightmare in which a squadron of bombers threaten the city; in the films final

207
sequence, city inhabitants look skywards. A mass of bombers then approaches the city overhead.
Like Songs from the Second Floor, You the Living also opens with an epigraph, quoting Goethe: Be
pleased then, you the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethes ice-cold wave will
lick your escaping foot. In a single image, commuters alight from a fog-shrouded tram whose
destination reads, Lethe the mythic name for the river of Oblivion where the dead drank to
forget their earthly lives.
Each film, through its series of brief incidents, catalogues the kind of moments, from the
petty to the deeply malevolent, that ultimately present human existence and experience as
contradictory, conflictual and problematic. Moreover, it is human beings who are demonstrably
the locus of either their own sufferings or the sufferings of others, even when frustration is merely
a factor of the lives we have constructed for ourselves as in the case of Anderssons missed lifts
and obstructive ticket queues.
Most evident in both films is their formal strategies of framing. You the Living, like Songs
from the Second Floor, continues the method of individual, self-contained static tableaux. The
camera moves only twice in the film, once as a slow track through a banquet, singling out a
particular character from the throng, and a second time as a barely visible framing adjustment. Dog
Days is equally steadfast in its use of meticulously framed and composed static images. However, it
punctuates these with more fluid use of hand-held sequences that contrast an intense
claustrophobia of framing, a close proximity to the films subjects and events, against the
rupturing stasis of the static compositions.
However, as has been stated already, these films do not stand out for their formal
characteristics alone, and despite the uniqueness of their respective visions particularly
Anderssons recourse to his own stylised mise-en-scne there is nothing about which to proclaim a
new style or aesthetic. They do not attempt to locate a formal characteristic as metaphor for a
predicative state, as often occurs in modernism, such as that of Antonioni, for example. Rather, it
is again (as with The Asthenic Syndrome or Russian Ark, Werckmeister Harmonies or Elephant) a matter of
each films incomplete, fragmentary itemisation of the disparate elements of its content coupled
with structures of serialisation and accumulation instead of exposition, reconciliation or
redemption that makes these films stand out. Moreover, this coalescing of content and
accumulative form suspends the central theme of contradiction: of contradiction as central to
human existence and contradiction as central to the form of the cinema.

208
In the first place, contradiction, at the level of content, is at the core of both films
preoccupation with the conceptual apparatus of sin and suffering. Dog Days distils its events to
those brief moments of heightened aggression, violence, abuse or antagonism, suspending any
lengthy exposition of cause or effect. At the heart of this is the suffering inflicted upon women by
men. A young woman, Claudia, is abused by her jealous boyfriend. In one scene, he rails against
her, denouncing her as just like all the other bitches whom he claims to have been unfaithful to
him. Likewise, Lucky, the violent and desperate accomplice of Wickerl abusive lover of the
middle-aged woman offers his own list of failures with women by way of his presumed apology
for the violent, drunken excesses meted out to the woman the night before. He locates the cause
of all his problems in his wife who will not allow him access to their son and the sins of all
women. In perhaps the films key scene of the contradictions that violence delivers, Lucky
threatens Wickerl at gun-point in front of the woman in an attempt to make him apologise for his
actions. However, when the woman declares her love for the abusive Wickerl, Lucky ceases,
resigned to disbelief. Finally, Hruby, under threat to find the culprits damaging his clients cars,
blames the vulnerable Anna, taking her to a holiday chalet and allowing the victims of vandalism to
visit, an action that ends in Annas rape by one car owner.
A profound loneliness affects all of the characters, those both giving and receiving
violence, and those whose struggles are more understated. The husband and wife who have lost
their daughter circle each other in silence within their own house. Finally, the woman takes to
striking her husband as, at the same time, she pleads with him finally to talk. The two come
together in a single shot, thereafter, sitting beside each other on their deceased daughters garden
swing-set: they are not yet able to speak, but the body language in proximity contains the slightest
embodiment of hope. Walter, the pensioner, resorts to returning packages to the supermarket to
complain, itself seeming testimony to a lonely mans only means to communication and
recognition. His enlisting of his housekeeper to dress in his deceased wifes clothes on the date of
their fiftieth anniversary recalls the pain of loss. Likewise, the willingness of the elderly
housekeeper to participate, even to perform a striptease, and to spend the night with the old man
whether for money or not is never made clear speaks of her loneliness too. The position of the
camera, a static frame on a plane that places itself as one third of a triumvirate of performance and
spectatorship is discomforting. However, Seidl places discomfort of his characters, subjects and
audience at the centre of his films. As a result critics often characterise his work as extreme or

209
provocative, even squalid and unbearable to watch (Wheatley 2008: 47). His reputation
extends from a list of documentary films for which the confessional is at its most raw: films such
as Animal Love (1996), Models (1998) and Jesus You Know (2003) develop a direct to camera
testimony on the part of the films subjects on themes of relationships with pets, glamour
modelling and religious confession respectively. Seidls complicity in the confessions is
accentuated by his technique of re-staging events, that is re-instigating events and involving the
subjects in the performance of acts to which they testify. Crucially, however, Seidls technique
refrains from judging; the films are themselves integrated into and integral to the re-staging of
confessional events. These are simply framed and exposed without recourse to commentary,
narrative or interpretative logic. It is the same technique that Seidl then adopts with his fiction
films (which also contain non-professional actors and real-world environments).
Seidls films mix their static frames with a claustrophobic hand-held, documentary
technique, the camera remaining in tight proximity to the subjects. The static frames are
respectful, pictorially framed but placing the subject within the frame of their environment
without passing self-reflexive judgement. The hand-held sequences foreground the cameras
presence within the space of the subjects actions but never as a point-of-view, reaction shot or
anything pertaining to an emotive force.
In this respect, Seidl always makes the camera, and himself, the film-maker, complicit in
the discomfort and anxiety of the events, it necessarily accuses itself within the formula of guilt.
This is distinct from a didactic or pedagogic relation to guilt, as evidenced in the work of a film-
maker such as Michael Haneke, whose implication of the audience in a film such as Funny Games
(1997) is genuinely provocative in a finger-wagging fashion. Seidl simply places himself, via his
camera, within the space of discomfort the film constructs.
You the Living shifts the emphasis marginally from loneliness to the difficulties of attaining
happiness or a meagre contentment. Each of the multiple protagonists is struggling with the daily
grind of modern living. For some, such as the lovelorn Anna, or the psychiatrist who speaks,
perhaps, for all in the film, happiness is an explicit goal but unattainable. For others, it is masked
in the simple failures that make the most ordinary or daily activities joining a ticket queue or
dealing with family and relatives that little bit more difficult than it might be. The legacy of the
fallen comes to the film in secular form, from the recurrent scene of a bar in which it is forever
closing time, and the barman who calls last orders: This is what you get for your sins, you

210
homeless bastards! Tomorrow is another day. Not an image of death for the sinners; not heaven
or hell but a Sisyphus-like struggle.
Crucial to both films is the mise-en-scne: the anywhere and everywhere of the modern or
globalised mercantile environment. For You the Living, as in Songs from the Second Floor, the artifice
of its studio sets is simply a paired down, or distilled version of a post-war Swedish modernism: an
architecture loaded with pathos since it represents the vision of that nations social-democratic
State. Yet, in Anderssons painterly rendition, it is a now jaundiced vision: a picture gone sour at
the very surface of its palette. There is deliberately nothing spectacular, inspiring or decadent
about such architecture. It is a simplified form of anonymity and ordinariness forgettable space
rendered as the common space of everyday existence.
Anderssons choice of static framing and tableau compositions, continued from his earlier
films, and directed to acts of guilt, suffering and contradiction, deliberately isolates the events or
acts, removing the cause and effect implications of narrative space. There is a narrative space in
the sense that all mise-en-scne is consistent, similar, related to a unifying, conditional world. But
each frame is an attention to detail, more painterly and pictorial than narrative; there is nothing of
consequence outside the frame. The frame isolates, iconically, each act. And like Seidl, Andersson
does not judge. The key theme of guilt that runs through each of his films, from World of Glory,
through Songs from the Second Floor, to You the Living, is the consistent referral to Swedens guilt of
its wartime collaboration with the Nazis a national guilt born by a Swedish film-maker.
Dog Days is more explicit in its concentration on the soullessness of modern, mercantile
planning and its de-humanising insistence on the prominence of retail space and vehicle access
over the communal or social. The suburban Austrian home is depicted as meticulously manicured
but hermetically sealed, the hot weather adding to the tendency of all houses to pull down their
window and door shutters. The central character of a security salesman, forever cajoling via the
potential threats of modern life, accentuates the prominence of enforced, constructed, willed
isolation. The figure of Anna does so too. For most of the film she occupies two kinds of space:
the car parks, intersections and verges of retail parks and their interconnecting arteries, and the
insides of the cars in which she hitches rides. In one particular scene, perhaps over-extending the
consumerist theme, spiritual life, consumer life and modern Austrian history are conflated into a
single car ride: Anna talks to a woman who recalls her family heredity, as a member of the
aristocracy before its abolition in 1918: Are you a princess? asks Anna. No but I would have had

211
a position at court. As it is I get by. The two women sing Catholic hymns as they drive. The
camera cuts to a travelling shot from the window: of the illuminated superstores of a massive out-
of-town retail park.
In the second sense, both films rely on a certain contradiction at the heart of cinematic
form: that is, both dwell on the precise incidents of antagonism, conflict, or dislocation that
narrative seeks to reconcile, or in other words, on those aspects of life that would be passed over
and forgotten with the arrival of either recognisable change, resolution or restitution. The
evocation of Lethe the mythical river of oblivion may be the signature for both films of the
ultimate destination for each and every character, and yet it is inevitably the key fact of the cinema
that it preserves such passing. Cinema is, as Jean-Louis Comolli wrote, revisiting Bazin, a matter
of always treating the motifs of ruin (Margulies 2003: 17). But, rather than the ruins of a material
world, it is the ruins or traces of conflict and contradiction that which the logic of the dialectic,
of story, or editing, or psychology, seeks to synthesise that are recalled; suspended so that they
cannot be forgotten. What these films aim to account for and to delineate is less the
representation of a particular place, object, thing or event. Rather, they seek to preserve a trace of
a deeper resistance to remembrance or reconciliation: the acts or gestures, as movements or
fragments of experience, at the heart of human interaction. They do not, however, pay homage to
the traditions of cause or embedded reason for such acts, nor do they seek to identify the results of
such actions or moments; merely the means. It is again reminiscent of Jean-Luc Nancys
configuration of sense as that always already recognisable slice of experience that simultaneously
makes itself felt whilst it slips away from symbolisation or signification. In that way it points to a
deeper aspect of sense, to a sense of embodying the human and therefore, what must be
endured at least before it can be explained.
In a radio broadcast in 2003, reproduced in Philosophical Chronicles (2008), Nancy posed
the question of the everyday, asking must we rescue the everyday? (Nancy 2008a: 39). Nancy
contrasted Heideggers attempts to locate an authentic history a destinal identity of a people
with its inauthentic corollary, the insignificance and matter-of-factness of the everyday that
constitutes the preontological ground of the ontological experience, that is, of existing in the
strong sense (Nancy 2008a: 38). Heidegger was forced to describe this everydayness as a being-
toward-death, devoid of the mythical destiny of the historical community of people; there was no
truth of the everyday that was not itself everyday and therefore banal, mediocre, and vulgar

212
(Nancy 2008a: 38). Any attempt to overcome this insignificance whether aesthetic, historical,
religious inevitably leads to the contradiction of a hyper-significance, even where it does not go
so far as becoming ritual or neurosis. The significant is, and always has been, traditionally located
in the exception: the true, the good, the beautiful. It is that which stands out in distinction from
the everyday. Nancy cites its philosophical lineage: the Platonic Idea, Husserlian transcendence,
Christian revelation; the thing should rise up and constitute an event, a coming-to-be (Nancy
2008a: 40). Its register, he says, is appearing. The everyday however, remains in its non-
appearance. Each time something is brought forth it annuls or eclipses the everyday, the
insignificant with significance. However, it is possible too for the everyday to maintain an
obstinacy within the event in the contradiction of its passing, since, says Nancy, only then, after
the fact, does it take place (Nancy 2008a: 41).
Here, crucially, Nancy finds a cinematic means for the inscription of the everyday, in
Kiarostamis film And Life Goes On. It is a point borrowed from his earlier examination of
Kiarostamis cinema, in which he argued that cinema is a gesture of movement between (a sliding
along) of one fragment of presentation, or patence, and the next:

Where does it slide to indefinitely? In a certain way, toward insignificance (insignifiance)


(there where the other arts appeal to an excess of significance). Toward the insignificance
of life that offers itself these images, always in movement, going toward no mystery, no
revelation, only this sliding along by means of which it leads itself from one image to
another (Nancy 2001: 78).

The cinema, and here, the particular cinema that is Dog Days and You the Living, presents precisely
the contradiction of the everyday and the exception: the violence of the everyday, isolated,
brought forth and then passed over, to the next, and the next. They do not offer celebration or
mourning, they do not seek to make singular any particular event or to determine any particular
essence. It is a kind of affirmation, not of the image of change or reconciliation but the affirmation
of the potential in carrying on. It is the question Nancy asks towards the end of his radio piece:
Empiricism and resignation, or a quiet resource for thinking otherwise? (Nancy 2008a: 43).
What remains is a kind of faith, that which says (and here Nancy proclaims the same as
Anderssons barman) that Tomorrow is another day (Nancy 2008a: 43).

213
The movement, or sliding along, from one moment to the next constantly replays the
contradiction of appearance and disappearance that separates the significant and the insignificant.
Each fragmentary sequence in Dog Days or You the Living delineates an instant for an instant
without accommodating it into any idea or code of signification. Only with passing does each
particular life or experience appear as a particular exception or moment of distinction before
rejoining the passage of, in Nancys words, the nonappearance of all other lives (Nancy 2008:
44).
Passing is, in a sense, the core of Ulrich Seidls second fiction film, Import Export. It is, in
effect, the passing of lives through the fixed borders of place and the necessities of economy. It is
not a literal, narrative passing as an encounter. Rather the opposite, the passing that is
continuous as an event without meetings or conclusions. It raises two lives out of the invisibility of
the constant passage and returns them to the continuity of passing on. The film recounts the
movements of two people across the Austrian-Ukrainian border. In one movement East to West
a young nurse, Olga, leaves her family and young baby to move to Austria in search of higher
wages. In the second movement West to East a young man, Paul, who owes money to
debtors, accompanies his stepfather on a business trip delivering slot machines; his uncle,
however, uses the economic disparity as a means to revel in hedonistic excess, drinking heavily
and hiring prostitutes. Struggling financially, Olga takes a second job in the Ukraine as an on-line
sex worker but fails to understand the demands of internet clients. In touch with a friend who has
already travelled West, Olga resolves to go to Austria. There she works variously as an office
cleaner and then as a housekeeper before being give a job as a cleaner in the geriatric ward of a
modern hospital. Paul, likewise, takes a job as a shopping centre security guard in Vienna but is
beaten and humiliated by a gang of youths. On the run from loan sharks, he joins his boorish
stepfather. In the hospital, Olgas nursing skills go unrecognised by the hospital and resented by
front line staff after Olga builds a caring relationship with an elderly patient, Erich, though later
Erich dies. At the same time, Olga has to ward off the attentions of a bullying male nurse and a
jealous female colleague. During a party given for the patients, the female colleagues jealously
leads to a fight with Olga. Travelling through Slovakia, Paul and his stepfather try to do business at
a lawless ghetto that is home to a large Roma population but are chased away. In the Ukraine, Paul
becomes increasingly frustrated and disillusioned with his stepfathers abuse of prostitutes he picks
up in bars. Paul walks out on his stepfather in disgust, attempting but failing to find work at a local

214
market. Olga is last seen sitting in the staff restroom laughing with colleagues. Paul is seen walking
a long country road hitching a ride.
Although Import Export is more prominently focused on the two lengthier sequences of
Olga and Paul, rather than the dozen or so characters that populate Dog Days, its method is the
same: the accumulation of fragmented instances of experience rather than a clearly related
continuity of cause and effect. Paul is first seen at a security guard training exercise; next, in
uniform, patrolling a shopping mall at night; then attacked and humiliated by the gang.
Thereafter, he is a security guard no longer. The transitions between such instances are withheld;
only their barest essentials gaze at each instance of experience. Likewise, Olga is hired and fired
without reason from housekeeping jobs when first arriving in Austria, at least seemingly on the
whim of householders. Each moment is a moment in passing of two people who appear in the
place of what can only be imagined as countless others that remain hidden or unrecorded. The
films opening, pre-credit shot, is of an anonymous man outside a snow-covered apartment block
repeatedly trying to start a moped. This figure does not appear again or play any other part in the
film. He emerges from the background of the modern city simply as a single encounter between
the city and Seidls camera.
The films final image, from which both Olga and Paul are absent, is a simple document of
the geriatric hospital ward at night, only the beeping and the flicker of lights from the medical
monitors that connect the human to the technological grid of modernity. This is accompanied by
the single voice of a dementia patient repeating over and over the word death. Such an image
suggests the gloomiest prognosis for human finitude but such negativity is the key to the
contradictory power of Seidls film. In a further essay from the same series of radio broadcasts
Nancy contemplates the function and value of negativity in a manner which cuts to the heart of the
necessity of Seidls film, something that should be born in mind when it is recalled that the
modern hospital authorities demonstrated a fundamental distrust of images and a deep reluctance
to allow filming to take place at all:

[] on every side, we rail against nihilism, against negativism, against all forms of retreat,
suspension, finitude, or impossibility, judged wrongly or rightly and most often
wrongly and confusedly to be either morbid or suicidal. In their place, we ask for
affirmation or value, decision and resolve, and from this perspective a symmetrical

215
haziness could suggest that one wishes at all cost to be positive, to use an expression that
has been forged, by no means at random, by advertising (Nancy 2008a: 53).

It is precisely those intermittent images from the banality of the intransigent motorcycle, to the
profound sadness of the geriatric ward that provide the films collective insights into the real of
material existence; those fragments shorn away from narrative arcs or psychological formulae.
Some negative critics have decried the film for being intrusive essentially for having the temerity
to even enter such a hospital space (as in Wheatley 2008: 47). Yet Seidls camera is anything but
intrusive. His precise, dispassionate and meticulous framing, rather than intruding on the dignity
of the patients, records their condition in iconographic simplicity. It is the same meticulous
compositional positioning neither salaciously provocative nor furtively suspicious by which
Seidl documents the sequences in the extraordinary Roma community in Slovakia: a community
that has been forced to take over an entire Soviet-era block, strewn with detritus since they are
outside of the systems of social welfare. Seidl positions his camera with care and records the
fragments of experience in the midst of the passage of his characters.
In the end, whatever may be said of Dog Days, You the Living or Import Export, they embody
and importantly seek to demonstrate a basic endurance at the heart of the human, to the human
beings resistance to its own grasp. None of them seeks to synthesise the events, characters,
moments or sequences drawn from modern lives on the margins into anything so much as an
absolute or a concept for overcoming the situations depicted or the finitude of human existence.
Yet nor do they consign such finitude to nihilism. They describe only the passage of presentation
and withdrawal of possible meanings into the evidence of exceptions, of moments of everyday
made distinct, that they then return to the everyday of countless non-appearances and without the
destinies of new beginnings. Whether transcendent or immanent, the formula for a human
redemption cannot be located or merely given over to tradition or positivity. The obscurity of the
closing image of the hospital ward in Import Export is contrasted with the horizon of the open road
on which Paul has set out. In both You the Living and Dog Days, there is essentially a turning to the
heavens: in the latter, as an acknowledgement of the rains; in the former, as a dream of
destruction but a dream nonetheless, since no shot actually connects the sequence of skyward
glances with the bombers in any diegetic relation. The failure of each film to offer an image or an
articulation of redemption or reconciliation is their necessary recourse to the contradiction of film

216
as the passage and exposure of sense and the human condition. It is, in a sense and a non-
religious sense a confession of the human condition through the necessity of its exposure.

217
CONCLUSION

Interrupted Myth and Necessary Negativity

This thesis has argued that in the period following the collapse of Soviet Communism a number of
films emerged, from Russia, Eastern and Western Europe and the United States, that interrupted
and made problematic the symbolic, narrative and conceptual frameworks for the expression of,
and relation between, violence and redemption. These films forcefully engage in a presentation of
situations and events driven by violent and destructive conditions and the suffering that results,
whilst denying any recourse to narrative reconciliation, interpretation, redemption or moral
judgement according to traditions. Equally, they do not assert distinctly modernist modes of
conceptual self-reflexivity or particular crises of the subject. Nor do they present the wider,
overarching modernist aim of collapsing art into politics whereby the production of art is directed
at redemption or an overcoming of the political or aesthetic. Furthermore, these films are united
by their presentation of a picture of violence, aggression and destruction as a perverse social and
psychological condition something akin to a fallen state or an aporetics of moral contradictions
that philosophy since Kant has called, in extremis, a radical evil. In short, these films present
humanity as always already disposed to conflict with its own best interests.
The films themselves, ranging from Kira Muratovas The Asthenic Syndrome to Gus Van
Sants Elephant, via the documentary form of Artur Aristakisyans Palms, the realist form of Bla
Tarrs Stntang and the studio artifice of Roy Anderssons Songs from the Second Floor, represent a
disparate selection not easily or obviously contained by traditional categorisation. They do not
conform to particular generic paradigms such as thriller, disaster movie, science fiction,
though some have such referential elements. They do not conform to formal or narrative
structures such as classical narrative, psychological realism, or modernist self-reflexivity, though
again, they draw on many such elements. Nor are they categorisable by national characteristics or
a legacy belonging to a particular national cinema tradition; though here we might point to a
particularly Western, or Occidental, orientation in the sense of their core relation to the
characteristics of fall and redemption.

218
However, it is this last characteristic, built around the equation of time (the post-
historical era) and place (the Western, Christian, tradition) that provides the thread that links
these films together. Their preoccupation with the recognisable but incomplete, dislocated or
insufficient symbols and myths associated with suffering, destruction, violence and redemption
offers a guide. In particular, the movement identified by Paul Ricoeur, the movement from
defilement through sin to guilt, provides a potent set of symbols that the films can be seen to
disrupt. This disruption, or interruption, provides a term that ties the approach taken by these
films to a parallel theoretical apparatus put forward by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy; the
interruption of symbols, myths and transcendent narratives as the very means to access an always
already experiential sense that, while not providing solutions to the disturbing conditions on
show, nevertheless can affect the spectator with a profound discomfort, an anxiety or a touching
concern. Such a denial of the formula for redemption does not imply an immediate collapse into
meaninglessness or nihilistic self-destruction. Ricoeurs assertion that the final stage of guilt is
determined by the facility of confession (in guilt I accuse myself), is reconfigured as an opening
onto sense or an always already real of the world in which we are all a part film-maker,
spectator, film that constitutes a form of confession through the passive apparatus of cinema.
This cinema places, through its engagement in a deliberate and at times confrontational insistence
on the act of showing, an imperative or demand upon the faculties of recognition and reflection.
Such a demand is not so much impressed upon the spectator through a conceptual apparatus of
specific signs or explicitly formalist, reflexive techniques as it is accumulated through selective
fragments orientated by the act of looking or showing, over and above an articulation or
discourse through montage (telling or emplotting). In short, such cinema utilises what is
central to the cinema as an audio-visual presentation, in advance of the conceptual formulae of
narrative, to respond to situations that, themselves, defy the logic and presupposition of words.
These films utilise a form of non-representational realism not grounded in a simple
mimetic relation to an objective world, but reminiscent of a real of the world proclaimed by
Jean-Luc Nancy as a reality indiscernibly and simultaneously empirical and transcendent, material
and ideative, physical and spiritual (in James 2006: 240n.13); or a real that is formed by the
impossibility of identifying either pure concepts or pure phenomena, and is rather a world
exposed through the excesses or suspensions that take place when either the taken-for-granted
symbolic worlds or the experiential material worlds are exposed at their limits.

219
Jean-Luc Nancys specific discourse on the cinema, in particular on the films of Abbas
Kiarostami, has been criticised for not ultimately providing applicable concepts to build a new
path for film studies (Kretzschmar 2002). However, it is the argument of this thesis that the
refusal to consign cinema to a semiotics of usable concepts and signs is precisely what makes
Nancys proposition useful and suggestive in respect of films that similarly refuse to conform to
workable, identifiable systems of representation. Such an insistence on concepts and signs that
transcend the specificity of content and form belies continued preoccupation with representation
and images per se and the breakdown of films into genres, types or units of meaning. Nancys
approach signals a recognition of the practice of cinema and its artefacts (films) as themselves
fragments of a world configured through the persistent fragmentation of experience. It provides
the incentive not to categorise films through the instigation of one system or regime of signs after
another but to realign cinema towards an engagement with the experiential world (of sense)
through those elements or aspects that cinema enframes. Such enframing is an act of selection
and limitation, of highlighting and directing and stands in marked difference to the narrative space
of a seamless world of motion, duration, narrative and meaning, or to the declaration of
meaninglessness. An insistence upon the codes of representation is challenged by the Austrian
director Ulrich Seidl when he states that the proper question in response to his films is not is this
pessimistic or optimistic (i.e. what does this mean; what conclusion has the film-maker drawn?)
but what am I showing and why? (i.e. look at this, why might it be necessary to show this?; what
if this were not shown?) (Seidl 2008).
Stephen Mulhall, writing on the cinema, points to the Heideggarian inflection of the word
enframing, which the German philosopher defined as a destructive grasp of nature as standing
reserve; that is, treating the world as material utilisable for technological, exploitable purposes
(Mulhall 2002: 48). Mulhall relates the term to its cinematic sense in an artistic medium that is
more dependent than any other on technological intervention. This presents a double-bind: the
cinema suggests, and has been variously identified as the medium par excellence for recording the
world without the mediation of human subjectivity. Such were the conclusions drawn by both
Vertov and Bazin from opposing ends of the formal spectrum. At the same time, the cinema
demands a clear responsibility on the part of the film-maker for the choices, whether configured
to predetermined structures of meaning or not, involved in every shot and edit: to take
responsibility for enframing the world (Mulhall 2002: 49).

220
Regarding this Heideggarian terminology, Nancys position uses the term care (in
relation to regard) as an orientation, on the part of the film-maker, of the cinematic act of
looking. That is, he extends the principle of responsibility for enframing to an engagement with
the presentation and withdrawal (syncopation) of meaning under the conditions of filming as
distinct from representing a narrative, dialectic or character-subjective stance using pre-
determined formulae. In short, he withdraws any pre-determined sense of the world in favour of a
sense itself derived from an exposure to a particular set of conditions and fragments of
experience: a sense that it is the world, rather than the world of images, that matters most. If
cinema (or the cinema of Kiarostami, at least) is anything, claims Nancy, it is a transport a
force or a motive that remains inexhaustible in its reasons and effects; [i]t is a transport
authorizing itself: not a narrative delivering a genesis or a maturation, an unconcealment or a
denouement, but at the most a chronicle of incidents in a journey that is truly neither of being nor
of becoming (Nancy 2001: 54). That is, rather than being a recuperation of being as the totality
of the real (as implied by Bazin and Kracauer) or of becoming, a virtuality or potentiality
accessible through the gaps of montage (Deleuze) either way suggestive of an essence of the
cinematic that transcends all particular films the cinema is a continuous fragmentation and
relativisation. The fragmentation itself becomes not so much a ground in itself (as in modernism),
or a unity in and of itself and of a greater whole (as in Romanticism) but a continuation and
further fragmenting of the fragments. Each fragment is itself a remainder to each and every
symbol, myth or traditional point of recognition whose signification has been exceeded.
The question of fragmentation of its history as an aesthetic strategy or form remains
as an underlying point of reference for the films described here; not least since concepts of
fragmentation are central to the cinema per se. Godard and Benjamin (along with Vertov and
Deleuze) conceive of the cinemas ability to break the visible world into fragments or to retrieve
and redeem particular fragments retrospectively as the cinemas essential mode. Rancire tells us
that the cinema is the material realisation of the Romantic definition of art as the union of
conscious and unconscious processes (Rancire 2004: 5) that itself emanated from the
fragmentation of the Kantian critical system and for which, at least according to the Jena
Romantics, found its true form within the poetic fragment (in Critchley 1997: 88-89).
However, Nancy suggests in The Sense of the World that such an aesthetics of fragmentation
its declared autonomy in the modern sense having confirmed for itself an absoluteness that

221
cancels the relativity it was its purpose to confirm requires an event of fragmentation in itself,
an endless dispersal of its occurrence, as Jeffrey Librett writes, to make relative its strewn
fragmentation (in Nancy 1997: xviii). Tied in with Nancys perspective on the cinema, it is a
question of adapting and extending this perspective to a broader range of films than that from
which he originates his claim, not, as has been said, to inaugurate a new system of applicable
concepts but to reflect a movement through and between films and themes that do not reduce
either film or theme to a generic system of formal traits or a dialectic of signs. It is taken in the
spirit put forward by Nancy at the close of The Evidence of Film:

Cinema is truly an art in any case the technique of a world that suspends myths. Even
if it has put itself in the service of myths, at the limit, it finishes by taking them away, it
carries off all epiphanies of meaning and of immobile presence into the evidence of
movement. A world that links by going from one film to the next, and that learns thus,
very slowly, another way of producing meaning (Nancy 2001: 78).

In the cases discussed above, this movement of dispersal is focused on violent and destructive
events or conditions, and circulates around a hiatus in the directional configurations of
redemption. The films confound any linear directionality that is future-oriented (the Christian
narrative that is mirrored in so many secular narratives of overcoming, of the individual, the
political or the technological) or retrospective (as in the Benjamin/Godard inflected restitution of
past fragments as dialectical images). They also move beyond the ultimately unifying
foundational totality of a realist world to be glimpsed through the contingent fragments within
fiction (Bazin, Kracauer, Wenders). In the end, what is fragmented is the arrangement of ends and
beginnings in themselves. As each film has a linear timeframe, within it, the pressures of its own
arrangement take on a certain aspect of the Romantic fragment. As Critchley remarks, the failure
or navet of the Romantic expression of the fragment is that it is both complete and incomplete,
whole and a part: It is a form that embodies interruption within itself. That is to say, the fragment
fails (Critchley 1997: 106).
Critchley, working from The Literary Absolute, an earlier text by Nancy and Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, states, the very form of an ensemble of fragments constitutes a field irreducible
to unity (Critchley 1997: 108). This replaces the Romantic fragment that is continually referred

222
back to the chaotic singularities that make it possible (Critchley 1997: 108). Ultimately,
Romanticism fails because, there is no such thing as romanticism, or a romantic work. All the
fragments offer is a practice of writing a speculative, critical, interrogative, limitless field or
ensemble that opens onto the promise of romanticism (Critchley 1997: 112).
What I hope to have shown is that, in place of writing, the cinema is able to present
itself as both the fragments and the fragmenting of the practice of looking at the world: assembling
a speculative, critical, interrogative, limitless field of visible and experiential evidence of events
and conditions configured by violent and destructive forces, by the mystery of such forces that
therefore fragment the structures of redemption and the marks of their ends and beginnings.
Simon Critchley emphasises wit and irony as the key elements of the Romantic fragment:
wit, in this context, is the sudden imparting of an idea, a moment or spark of ingenuity; irony, is
the double-bind at the heart of human communication, the expression of the simultaneous
necessity and impossibility of a complete communication (Critchley 1997: 112). In cinematic
terms, wit is the enframing of the remarkable image, the fleeting impression of an emotion, an
experience (what Wenders would call the found or profound and Herzog, an ecstatic truth);
irony is the impossibility at the heart of cinemas dialectic of montage. Critchley adds, wit is
synthetic the chemical mixing of disparate elements, irony is diaretic, the separation or division
of those elements (Critchley 1997: 114). In a revealing phrase that cuts to the heart of the
Romantic fragment and similarly its position in the development of Jean-Luc Nancys thinking of
sense, recalled as a reality indiscernibly and simultaneously empirical and transcendent, material
and ideative, physical and spiritual, Critchley claims that the movement between wit and irony in
the fragment contains a spectrality of terms resistant, ultimately, to a final concept: The rhythm
of the romantic fragment is an interminable oscillation devoted to the indissoluble conflict of the
absolute and the relative (Critchley 1997: 115).
What Nancy derives from such an oscillation is the artwork, and the status of the non-
representational real of the cinema, as syncopation. As noted in Chapter Two, Nancy develops
syncopation from his reading of Kant and the interruption that takes place between poetry and
speculative thought. We should recall here that this syncopation is the inevitable occurrence
within language of the interruption and suspension of absolute meaning by the process of style.
Likewise, the cinematic process of suspense that contains and contends with the situations of
violence and destruction leads to the same hiatus within the films: the giving of a sense before a

223
signification. Nancy continues this development through a reading of Hegel that again suspends
the revelation of truth or spirit delivered by the synthesis of the dialectic, and configures the
artwork as simply the very act of presentation (James 2006: 212). In contrast to the Hegelian
response to Romanticism, this suspension of the dialectic is neither the ruination nor the salvation
of art, but the moment when presentation exceeds presentation to become simply the sensuous
or affective form of itself what Nancy calls an offering of offering (in James 2006: 213). Here,
through the presentation of the artwork, or in the particular case of the cinema, through the
presentation of a look that opens onto sense, this offering becomes a confession, a giving up of
a sense of suffering, violence, or injustice. However, the cinemas mode of apparatus, its passive
acceptance of the look and the incompleteness of the necessarily fragmented shot (part symbol,
part excess of the symbolic), refuses the traditional subjectivity of confession but moves beyond
the pure contingency of witnessing. The cinema, in terms that recall Nancys transimmanence,
offers an integration of both senses of vision: the sensory and the ideative. Through suspension
and excess, the vision of speculative thought merges with that of sight, of looking. If this can be
said to redeem the real as a recognition of the world, as it is experienced, with its injustices and
contradictions, then it points towards redemption. But, equally, as the hiatus of concept and
teleology, it exposes redemptions traditions and myths and exhausts them. It gives recognition to
the impossibility of reifying redemption in representational terms.
What these films engage with, in their various interruptions and conflicts, repetitions and
obscurities, and, most of all, their disruption of their own ends, is a pattern of experience that
mirrors the tension of a present that has, in philosophical terms, exhausted metaphysics.
However, within the linearity of cinemas motions they ceaselessly struggle against the formulae
for ends that, as such, serve as an affirmation of a sense and a world in the here and now. Nancy
writes: []sense beyond all sense, sense in the absence of sense, the overflowing of sense as
element of the world or world as absolute excess of sense can be considered tragic, comical, sublime,
and/or grotesque (Nancy 1993: 23). This takes on, in Nancys schema, the primary or
underlying objective of art and literature:

putting on stage the sense of sense, figuring and agitating its masks, its explosions of light, its
trajectories, in an intense dramatization the resource of which is the Occident itself as an

224
original obscuring of sense: an interruption of myth and sacrifice, which become what the
Occident can henceforth only mime (this is what it says about itself) (Nancy 1993: 23).

He finishes with the following remarks that serve to summarise the films described above:

The curtain has fallen on the metaphysical scene, on metaphysics as scene of


(re)presentation. But that which is played henceforth in other ways, and on a theatre of the
world that, quite mistakenly, certain people take to be a screen of simulation, while
others (at bottom, the same) take it to be a scenario of disenchantment, that which is
played in the formidable drifting and cracking of all the continents [] is anew the
sending of an affirmation of the absolute excess of sense. Again, to be sure, it is sublime
and grotesque, atrocious and laughable, but it is also already and anew beyond these
judgements, beyond these assignations of the sense of sense. Not that everything simply
has to be accepted: but the resistance to the unacceptable itself ought to proceed from
another sense, from the nude, denuded affirmation all the more pointed and exigent
of the sense of the world as world (Nancy 1993: 24).

In responding to the contradictions, violence and suffering on display along with the humour,
irony, and the remarkable images these films also contain this double-vision responds to
negativity with the offering or confession of negativity. Their strategy encapsulates the cinemas
most basic orientation, but they resist the temptation to seek recovery, reconciliation or
redemption. As a result they often meet with resistance, or the critical accusation of drowning in
their own misery, despondency or hopelessness. In contrast, however, these films may also point
to a necessary negativity that refuses the recovery of positivity or overcoming; that is, they refuse
to transform or domesticate it, to absolve it or divide it between values and subjects good or
bad. Such a negativity is not a refusal of meaning or a descent into despair or nihilism but a
confession and a demand that is never given, but that simply continues to move in fragments
from one form or expression to the next; from one film to the next.

225
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, Giorgio (1995), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. D. Heller-Roazen).
Stanford: Stanford University Press

Agamben, Giorgio (1996), Repetition and Stoppage: Guy Debords Technique of Montage
(trans. B. Holmes) in Documenta Documents 2. Ostfildern: Cantz, Eng-Ger Edition

Agamben, Giorgio (1999), Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (trans. D. Heller-
Roazen). New York: Zone Books

Agamben, Giorgio (2004), The Open: Man and Animal (trans. K. Attell). Stanford: Stanford
University Press

Agamben, Giorgio (2005), The Time That Remains (trans. P. Dailey). Stanford: Stanford University
Press

Aitken, Ian (2006), Realist Film Theory and Cinema: The Nineteenth-Century Lukcsian and Intuitionist
Realist Traditions. Manchester & New York: University of Manchester Press

Andersson, Roy (2004), Songs from the Second Floor. DVD Commentary, New Yorker Video, US

Aug, Marc (1995), Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (trans. J. Howe).


London & New York: Verso

Badiou, Alain (2005), Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy (eds. & trans. O. Feltham
& J. Clemens). London & New York: Continuum

Badiou, Alain (2007), The Century (trans. A. Toscano). Cambridge: Polity Press

Bazin, Andr (1971a), What is Cinema?, Volume 1 (trans. H. Gray). Berkeley, Los Angeles &
London: University of California Press

Bazin, Andr (1971b), What is Cinema?, Volume 2 (trans. H. Gray). Berkeley, Los Angeles &
London: University of California Press

Benjamin, Andrew (2008), Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and Animals in The South
Atlantic Quarterly (ed. A. Ross), 107:1. pp. 71-87

Benjamin, Walter (1999), Theses on the Philosophy of History in Illuminations (ed. H. Arendt;
trans. H. Zorn). London: Pimlico. pp. 245-255

Bernstein, Richard J. (2002), Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation. Cambridge: Polity Press

226
Boggs, C. & Pollard, T (2003), A World in Chaos: Social Crisis and the Rise of Postmodern Cinema.
Lanham, Boulder, New York & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield

Bogue, Ronald (2003), Deleuze on Cinema. New York & London: Routledge

Bordwell, D., Staiger, J., and Thompson, K. (1985) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and
Production to 1960. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul

Boyle, Danny (2006) Elephant. Audio Commentary, DVD, Blue Underground

Bracewell, Michael (2000) Not Waving but Drowning in Sight & Sound. Vol. 11, Issue 3. pp. 36-
37

Christie, Ian (2003), The Civilising Russian in Sight & Sound. Vol. 13, Issue 4. pp. 10-11

Clark, Timothy (2002), Martin Heidegger. London & New York: Routledge

Court, John M. (2007), Dictionary of the Bible. London: Penguin Books

Critchley, Simon (1997), Very Little, Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. London & New
York: Routledge

Critchley, Simon (2007) Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London &
New York: Verso

Cronin, Paul, ed. (2002), Herzog on Herzog. London: Faber and Faber

Daney, Serge (1992), Godard Makes [Hi]Stories in Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image 1974-1991 (ed.
R. Bellour). New York: The Museum of Modern Art. pp. 159-168

Deleuze, Gilles (2004), The Logic of Sense (trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale). London & New York:
Continuum

Deleuze, Gilles (2005a), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam).
London & New York: Continuum

Deleuze, Gilles (2005b), Cinema 2: The Time-Image (trans. H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta). London &
New York: Continuum

Derrida, Jacques (1996), The Gift of Death (trans. D. Wills). Chicago & London: The University of
Chicago Press

Derrida, Jacques (1999), Marx & Sons in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas
Specters of Marx (ed. M. Sprinker). London & New York: Verso, pp. 213-169

Derrida, Jacques (2006), Specters of Marx (trans. P. Kamuf). New York & London: Routledge

227
Doane, Mary Ann (2002), The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive.
Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press

Eagleton, Terry (2003), Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing

Ebert, Roger (2003) Russian Ark review,


http//:rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20030131/REVIEWS/30131030
4/1023

Galt, Rosalind (2008), The Obviousness Of Cinema in World Picture 2,


http://english.okstate.edu/worldpicture/WP_2/Galt.html

Garneau, M. & Cisneros, J. (2004), Films Aesthetic Turn: A Contribution from Jacques
Rancire in SubStance, Vol.33, No.1, Issue 103, pp.108-125

Gasch, Rodolphe (1997), Alongside the Horizon in The Sense of Philosophy: On Jean-Luc Nancy
(eds. D. Sheppard, S. Sparks & C. Thomas). London & New York: Routledge, pp. 140-156

Gauchet, Marcel (1997), The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (trans. O.
Burge). Princeton: Princeton University Press

Gaudreault, Andr (1990), Film, Narrative, Narration: The Cinema of the Lumire Brothers in
Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (ed. T. Elsaesser). London: BFI Publishing. pp. 68-73

Goddard, Michael (2001), The scattering of time crystals: Deleuze, mysticism and cinema in
Deleuze and Religion (ed. M. Bryden). London & New York: Routledge. pp. 53-64

Graffy, Julian (2003), Russian Ark review in Sight & Sound, Vol. 13, Issue 4. pp. 52-53

Gunning, Tom (1990), Non-Continuity, Continuity, Discontinuity: A Theory of Genres in Early


Films in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (ed. T. Elsaesser). London: BFI Publishing. pp. 86-
103

Hallward, Peter (2004), Introduction in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (ed.
P. Hallward). London & New York: Continuum

Hansen, Miriam (1987), Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of
Technology in New German Critique, No.40, Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory. pp.179-224

Harte, Tim (2005), A Visit to the Museum: Aleksandr Sokurovs Russian Ark and the Framing
of the Eternal in Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 1. pp. 43-58

Inwood, Michael (2000), Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford & New York: Oxford
University Press

James, Ian (2006), The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy.
Stanford: Stanford University Press

228
James, Nick (2010), Passive Aggressive in Sight and Sound. Vol. 20, Issue 4. p. 5

Jameson, Fredric (1999), Marxs Purloined Letter in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques
Derridas Specters of Marx (ed. M. Sprinker). London & New York: Verso, pp. 26-67

Kearney, Richard (2003), Strangers, Gods and Monsters. London & New York: Routledge

Klimov, Elim (2005) Come and See. DVD Commentary, Nouveaux Pictures

Koch, Gertrud (2000), Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction (trans. J. Gaines). New Jersey: Princeton
University Press

Kovcs, Andrs Blint (2004), Stntang in The Cinema of Central Europe (ed. P. Hames).
London: Wallflower Press, pp. 237-243

Kovalov, Oleg (1999), The Russian Idea: Synopsis for a Screenplay in Russia on Reels: The Russian
Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (ed. B. Beumers). London & New York: I.B. Tauris, pp. 12-24

Kracauer, Siegfried (1970), Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. London, Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press

Kretzschmar, Laurent (2002), Is Cinema Renewing Itself? in Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 15

Kristeva, Julia (1986), Ellipsis on Dread and the Specular Seduction, in Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (ed. P. Rosen). New York: Columbia University Press, pp236-243

Lechte, John (1994), Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity. London &
New York: Routledge

Lee, Nathan (2007) Oh, the Humanit in Village Voice: http://www.villagevoice.com/2007-05-


08/film/oh-the-humanit/

Lim, Dennis (2003) Vienna Sizzles, and Sweaty Austrians Do the Wrong Thing in Village Voice:
http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-08-19/film/vienna-sizzles-and-sweaty-austrians-do-the-
wrong-thing/1

Lingis, Alphonso (1997) Anger in Alongside the Horizon in The Sense of Philosophy: On Jean-Luc
Nancy (eds. D. Sheppard, S. Sparks & C. Thomas). London & New York: Routledge, pp. 197-215

MacCabe, Colin (1999), Bayonets in Paradise in Sight & Sound, Vol. 9, Issue 2, pp. 11-14

Margulies, Ivone ed. (2003), Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. Durham & London: Duke
University Press

Maslin, Janet (1994) SATANTANGO; A Seven-Hour Contemplation of Boredom, Decay and


Misery in New York Times;

229
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C0CEDC113DF93BA35753C1A962958260&s
cp=1&sq=satantango&st=cse

McCarthy, Todd (2003) Elephant,


http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117920801.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0, Sun., May
18, 2003

McGinn, Bernard (1998), Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages. New York:
Columbia University Press

McMahon, Laura (2010), Post-deconstructive realism? Nancys cinema of contact in New Review
of Film and Television Studies, 8: 1, pp.73-93

Michaud, Ginette (2005), In Media Res: Interpretations of the Work of Art and the Political in
Jean-Luc Nancy, in SubStance, Vol. 34, No. 1, Issue 106, pp.104-128

Monaco, James (2000), How to Read a Film. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press

Morrey, Douglas (2008), Open Wounds: Body and Image in Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis
in Film-Philosophy, Vol. 12, no.1: pp.10-30; http://www.film-
philosophy.com/2008v12n1/morrey2.pdf

Mulhall, Stephen (2002), On Film. London & New York: Routledge

Mulhall, Stephen (2005a), Philosophical Myths of the Fall. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton
University Press

Mulhall, Stephen (2005b), Heidegger and Being and Time. London & New York : Routledge

Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991), The Inoperative Community (trans. P. Connor). Minneapolis & London:
University of Minnesota Press

Nancy, Jean-Luc (1993), The Birth to Presence (trans. B. Holmes & Others). Stanford: Stanford
University Press

Nancy, Jean Luc (1997), The Sense of the World (trans. J. s. Librett). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press

Nancy, Jean-Luc (2001), The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami (trans. C. Izizarry & V. Andermatt
Conley). Bruxelles: Yves Gevaert Publisher

Nancy, Jean-Luc (2004), Philosophy Without Conditions in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the
Future of Philosophy (ed. P. Hallward; trans. R. Brassier). London & New York: Continuum, pp.
39-49

Nancy, Jean-Luc (2005), The Ground of the Image (trans. J. Fort). New York: Fordham University
Press

230
Nancy, Jean-Luc (2007), The Creation of the World or Globalization (trans. F. Raffoul & D.
Pettigrew). Albany: State University of New York Press

Nancy, Jean-Luc (2008a), Philosophical Chronicles (trans. F. Manjali). New York: Fordham
University Press

Nancy, Jean-Luc (2008b), Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (trans. B. Bergo, G.


Malenfant & M. B. Smith). New York: Fordham University Press

Nancy, Jean-Luc (2008c), Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body (trans. S. Clift, P-A. Brault &
M. Naas). New York: Fordham University Press

Neiman, Susan (2004), Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton &
Oxford: Princeton University Press

Newman, Kim (2006), Torture Garden, in Sight & Sound, Vol. 16, Issue 6, pp.28-31

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968), The Will to Power (trans. W. Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale). New
York: Vintage Books

Orr, John (2001), Bla Tarr: Circling the Whale, in Sight & Sound, Vol. 11, Issue 4, pp. 22-24

Parr, Adrian ed. (2005), The Deleuze Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1980), Observations on the Long Take in October, Vol. 13, pp.3-6

Pixley, Andrew (2005) The Quatermass Collection, Viewing Notes, BBC DVD

Rabinbach, Anson (1997), In the Shadow of Catastrophe. Berekely, Los Angeles & London:
University of California Press

Rancire, Jacques (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics (trans. G. Rockhill). London & New York:
Continuum

Rancire, Jacques (2006), Film Fables (trans. E. Battista). Oxford & New York: Berg

Rancire, Jacques (2007), The Future of the Image (trans. G. Elliott). London & New York: Verso

Redhead, Steve (2004) Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press

Ricoeur, Paul (1965), Fallible Man (trans. C. A. Kelbley). Chicago: Regnery

Ricoeur, Paul (1966), Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (trans. E. V. Kohk).
Evanston: Northwestern University Press

231
Ricoeur, Paul (1967), The Symbolism of Evil (trans. E. Buchanon). Boston: Beacon Press

Ricoeur, Paul (2004), The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (ed. D. Ihde). London &
New York: Continuum

Roberts, Graham (1999), The Meaning of Death: Kira Muratovas Cinema of the Absurd in
Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (ed. B. Beumers). London & New York: I.B.
Tauris, pp. 144-160

Rodowick, D. N. (1997), Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine. Durham & London: Duke University Press

Russell, Catherine (1995), Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure and New Wave Cinemas. Minneapolis &
London: University of Minnesota Press

Sad, S.F. (2004), Shock Corridors in Sight & Sound, Vol. 14, Issue 2, pp. 16-18

Schrader, Paul (1972), Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Berkeley: Da Capo Press

Seidl, Ulrich (2009), Import Export. DVD interview, Trinity Filmed Entertainment Ltd

Sim, Stuart (1999), Derrida and the End of History. Cambridge: Icon Books

Simms, Karl (2003), Paul Ricoeur. London & New York: Routledge

Simon, Alissa (2007) The Class,


http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=print_review&reviewid=VE1117934180&categoryi
d=31, Fri., July 13, 2007

Smith, S. A. (2002), The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press

Stam, R., Burgoyne, R. & Flitterman-Lewis, S. eds. (1992), New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics.
London & New York: Routledge

Stam, Robert (2000), Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing

Stoichita, Victor I. (1997), A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books

Taubman, Jane (2005), Kira Muratova. London & New York: I.B. Tauris

Taylor, R. & Christie, I. eds. (1988), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896-
1939. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Toscano, Alberto (2007), European nihilism and beyond: commentary by Alberto Toscano in
The Century. Cambridge: Polity Press

Virilio, Paul (1989), War and Cinema (trans. P. Camiller). London & New York: Verso

232
Virilio, Paul (2006), Art and Fear (trans. J. Rose). London & New York: Continuum

Weber, Max (2004), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (trans. T. Parsons). London &
New York: Routledge

Wenders, Wim (1991), The Logic of Images (trans. M. Hofmann). London & Boston: Faber and
Faber

Wheatley, Catherine (2008) Europa Europa in Sight & Sound, Volume 18, Issue 10, pp. 46-49

Winter, Jay (1998), Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Zizek, Slavoj (1997), The Abyss of Freedom. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press

Zizek, Slavoj (2001), The Fragile Absolute. London & New York: Verso

Zizek, Slavoj (2009), Violence. London: Profile Books

233
FILMOGRAPHY

Principal Films:

The Asthenic Syndrome (Asteniceskij Sindrom)


(1990 USSR, 153 min, b/w & col.)
Dir. Kira Muratova
Sc. Kira Muratova, Sergei Popov, Alexander Tschernych
Ph. Vladimir Pankov
Ed. Valentina Olejnik

Dog Days (Hundstage)


(2001 Aus, 127 min, col.)
Dir. Ulrich Seidl
Sc. Ulrich Seidl
Ph. Wolfgang Thaler
Ed. Andrea Wagner

Elephant
(2003 US, 85 min, col.)
Dir. Gus Van Sant
Sc. Gus Van Sant
Ph. Harris Savides
Ed. Gus Van Sant

Flanders (Flandres)
(2006, Fr, 91 min, col.)
Dir. Bruno Dumont
Sc. Bruno Dumont
Ph. Yves Cape
Ed. Guy Lecorne

Import/Export
(2007 Aus, 135 min, col.)
Dir. Ulrich Seidl
Sc. Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz
Ph. Ed Lachman, Wolfgang Thaler
Ed. Christof Schertenleib

Palms (Ladoni)
(1993 Rus, 129 mins, b/w)
Dir/Sc/Ph/Ed. Artur Aristakisyan

234
Russian Ark (Russki Kovcheg/Venlinen arkki)
(2002 Rus/Ger/Jap/Can/Fin/Den, 99 min, col.)
Dir. Alexander Sokurov
Sc. Anatoli Nikiforov, Alexander Sokurov
Ph. Tilman Bttner
Ed. Sergey Ivanov

Stntang (Satans Tango)


(1994, Hun/Ger/Switz, (Pt 1) 300 min / (pt 2) 135 min, b/w)
Dir. Bla Tarr
Sc. Lszl Krasznahorkai, Bla Tarr
Ph. Gbor Medvigy
Ed. Agnes Hranitzky

Songs from the Second Floor (Snger frn Andra Vningen)


(2000 Swe, 100 min, col.)
Dir. Roy Andersson
Sc. Roy Andersson
Ph. Istvn Borbs, Jesper Klevens

Werkmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmnik)


(2000 Hun/Fr/Ger/It/Switz, 145 min, b/w)
Dir. Bla Tarr
Sc. Lszl Krasznahorkai, Bla Tarr
Ph. Mikls Gurbn, Erwin Lanzensberger, Gbor Medvigy, Emil Novk, Rob Tregenza, Patrick
de Ranter, Jrg Widmer
Ed. Agnes Hranitzky

You, the Living (Du Levande)


(2006, Swe/Ger/Fr/Den/Nor/Jap, 94 min, col.)
Dir. Roy Andersson
Sc. Roy Andersson
Ph. Gustav Danielsson
Ed. Anna Marta Waern

235
Other Films:
(in order of appearance in the text)

Damnation, Bla Tarr, Hungary, 1988


World of Glory, Roy Andersson, Sweden 1994
Gerry, Gus Van Sant, USA 2001
Last Days, Gus Van Sant, USA 2005
Histoire(s) du cinma, Jean-Luc Godard, France 1989-98
Life and Nothing More, Abbas Kiarostami, Iran 1992
Distance, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan 2003
Still Life, Jia Zhang-ke, Peoples Republic of China 2006
Quatermass and the Pit, Roy Ward Baker, UK 1967
The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich, USA 2004
Cloverfield, Matt Reeves, US 2007
Funny Games, Michael Haneke, Austria 1997
The Explosion of a Motor Car, Cecil Hepworth, UK 1900
Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino, US 2003
Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, USSR 1925
The General Line, Sergei Eisenstein, USSR 1929
Man With A Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, USSR 1928
The Last Bolshevik, Chris Marker, France 1993
In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni, Guy Debord, France 1979
Tokyo-Ga, Wim Wenders, Germany 1983
Lessons of Darkness, Werner Herzog, Germany 1992
The Wild Blue Yonder, Werner Herzog, Germany 2005
Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders, Germany 1991
The State of Things, Wim Wenders, Germany 1982
Diary of a Country Priest, Robert Bresson, France 1950
Aguirre, Wrath of God, Werner Herzog, Germany 1972)
Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog, Germany 1982
La Soufrire, Werner Herzog, Germany 1976
Fata Morgana, Werner Herzog, Germany 1970

236
Late Spring, Yasuhiro Ozu, Japan 1950
Kaspar Hauser, Werner Herzog, Germany 1975
Heart of Glass, Werner Herzog, Germany 1976
Stroszek, Werner Herzog, Germany 1976
Even Dwarfs Started Small, Werner Herzog, Germany 1970
Bells from the Deep, Werner Herzog, Germany 1993
The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden 1957
Elephant, Alan Clarke, UK 1988
Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore, USA 2002
United 93, Paul Greengrass, USA 2006
World Trade Center, Oliver Stone, USA 2006
Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant, USA 2008
The Class, Ilmar Raag, Estonia 2007
Beau Travail, Claire Denis, France 1999
Apocalypse Now, Francis Coppola, USA 1979
Come and See, Elim Klimov, USSR 1984
The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick, USA 1998
Redacted, Brian De Palma, USA 2008
Jarhead, Sam Mendes, USA 2005
Jaccuse, Abel Gance, France 1919
Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott, USA 2001
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Rex Ingram, USA 1920
Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg, USA 1998
Band of Brothers, various, USA 2001 (TV)
All Quiet on the Western Front, Lewis Milestone, USA 1930
Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick, UK 1987
Born on the Fourth of July, Oliver Stone, USA 1989
Battle for Haditha, Nick Broomfield, UK 2007
Apocalypse Now Redux, Francis Coppola, US 1979/2000
Ivans Childhood, Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR 1962
Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman, Israel 2008

237
2012, Roland Emmerich, US 2009
Mad Max trilogy, George Miller, Australia 1979-1985
The Postman, Kevin Costner, USA 1997
Animal Love, Ulrich Seidl, Austria 1996
Models, Ulrich Seidl, Austria 1998
Jesus You Know, Ulrich Seidl, Austria 2003

238

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi